The Archaeologists

by Hal Niedzviecki

  Charlie puts a hand on her chest. She feels her heart against her thin nightdress. She’s been having nightmares about the woods. Ever since that night in the lodge when Tim and her—she shouldn’t have brought him there. The sweat lodge is a Sacred Place. It’s where the Natives did their rituals and talked to their gods.

  So dark down here.

  She stops suddenly, realizes that she doesn’t know where Tim is. She listens for his footsteps. All she hears is the mute hum of the live woods. Then a voice:

  Chaaaaaarrrrr-leeee…

  It’s Tim fooling with her. He’s hiding behind a tree, trying to scare her. She looks around. Where is he? The Natives tell stories about things like this: ravens and foxes, tricksters who pretend to be your friend but really aren’t.

  Chaaaaaa-rrrrr-leeee…

  Quit it!

  Chaaaaaarrrrr-leeee…

  Shut up!

  In her nightmares, someone chases her. Watches her. She feels eyes on her now.

  Chaaaaaa-rrrrr-leeee…

  Stop it or I’m leaving!

  She isn’t scared. It’s just—if they find out, she’ll be grounded for life. Or worse. The last time, when she woke up in the lodge, she didn’t get home till almost eleven. Her parents were on the verge of calling the police when her trembling fingers finally managed to fit key into lock. Unable to come up with a plausible lie, she told them a version of the truth. She went for a walk along the river.

  In the woods? her father immediately interjected.

  She got tired, and she sat down for a minute.

  In the woods?

  And then, she told them, I fell asleep.

  In the woods?

  The next thing I knew it was dark, she remembers saying in a piteous voice she thought she was putting on.

  But the next thing she knew she was crying. Her father’s baleful gaze. She rushed into her mother’s arms.

  Her parents run affiliated medical practices catering mainly to the needs of the region’s ever-expanding Southeast Asian suburban population, well-to-do immigrants and their first generation offspring; parents who keep a tight reign on the activities of their children, children who awkwardly carry the facade of immigrant pride and old-world values even as a new-world of pubescent stirrings and suburban plenty beckon them to a future of chat-apps and supermalls and casual partying their parents can’t even imagine.

  Is it so surprising that Charlie’s mom and dad will fail to identify the sweet tang of smoke clinging to the walls of their daughter’s room? Their little Charulekha Nath, benefiting both from the strict no-nonsense Indian way and all the opportunities of a bountiful West where a man and woman can work side by side at twin medical practices—he’s ear, nose, throat; she’s neurology. Together they have accumulated enough money to pay the dowry for a hundred daughters. Though here in the West, you have just one or two, even though their giant house on the ridge overlooking the valley sometimes feels ridiculously empty compared to even their admittedly middle class Delhi villa where it was still two to a small dusty room with a window carrying the smells of sewage and sizzling masala spices.

  They grounded her.

  Chaaaaaa-rrrrr-leeee.

  Her name. Elongated, extended, whispered in a chant, lingered on before being exhaled and allowed to dissipate like the smoke from some ancient ceremonial pipe. Will he stop that?

  Her head pounding. Her mouth dry sour sweet.

  Chaaaaaa-rrrrr-leeee.

  She pulls her nightshirt against her. She’s shivering now. A sudden chill.

  Chaaaaaa-rrrrr-leeee.

  Shut up! she yells.

  Wheeeeeere are you Chaaaar-leee?

  You better shut up!

  Where is she? She doesn’t know. She thought she was following Tim. But he’s—

  She looks behind her. Shiny sheen of a thousand new leaves in a wood she’s seen a thousand times. It’s different in the dark though. These are hunting grounds. At night, Charlie read, the fleet-footed braves could creep up silently on sleeping deer startled into slumbered slaughter. The faster she walks the more she’s sure of it. She’s being watched. Followed. Silly girl, her father remonstrates. Why would you go all alone in the woods? Something most bad could happen to you, you could get—

  Charlie freezes. The night forest, full of pitfall dips and root trip-ups, seems to be closing in around her. I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to—

  She’ll go back to the lodge, light candles. Down on her knees in the ancient chamber she’ll—

  pray.

  A sharp crack behind her. Animal? Moccasin foot snapping a twig? In such moments does a hunt turn? Tomorrow, after school, she’ll go back to the lodge, make amends, ask forgiveness from her parents, from ghosts, from ancient totems sitting inert in the ashy dirt. She hears panting. Breathing. Hers? And something else. Hot shadow echo. Tears streaming down her cheeks. She can hear the river in front of her. Terrified, she spins around and around. She pants heavy hot child breaths. She cries with her eyes closed. She feels it now. Approaching footfalls.

  Leave me alone! she screams.

  Then everything quiets.

  The sound of the river. Inevitable. A spirit world’s retribution.

  Tim walks through the gaps in the dark, just one of those invisible night creatures awake, alone. His habitat: suburban streets without sidewalks bordering endless squares of self-same lawn. In such an environment, it’s better to be nocturnal. By day you’re exposed. Nowhere to hide. At night, you’re invisible. You practically don’t exist.

  He walks, knowing where he’s going, not entirely sure when and how he set off on this particular part of his journey. It’s the China, he rationalizes. The China is good. The China makes you feel like your feet don’t touch the ground while the minutes dance into hours and everything changes without you ever taking a single step. Plus he took one of the pills. Two. He took two. He remembers watching the kid, following the kid, hiding from the kid. Why was he doing that? She was crying, he could hear her, gulping and crying and trying to get her breath. Tim couldn’t help her. He wanted to, but somehow he just couldn’t. He trailed her, his feet barely touching the ground. He’d gone invisible; he’d disappeared. He was a ghost now, he told himself, like his mother. Charlie broke into a shuffling stumbling jog. Go home, kid, he thought. And she did. He watched her shimmy up the tree and drop through the open window. He watched her from down below, hidden in the dark, in the bush. A light turned on briefly—her bedside lamp—and then the light extinguished. Still, Tim remembers, he waited, arms folded over his chest, paying some sort of silent vigil. He was sorry. He hadn’t meant to—but now—

  Whatever she was supposed to do, whatever she was sent to tell him, he was done with her now.

  Just a stupid kid, Tim thinks, moving down the sidewalk, feeling himself, half walking half gliding, floating fast now that he’s out of the forest. Just a kid. The thought fills him with inchoate sadness. He was just a kid too, when he started on this journey. And now I’m a—

  ghost, he reminds himself. Like my—

  Never mind that. He’s done with all that. He’s going to—and then—it’ll be—

  over.

  He takes a few more steps and finds himself rounding the corner. This is it. Lower Grove. The street where he grew up.

  Carly. This is—

  His mind feels clearer now. Tim dries his sweaty face on the filthy sleeve of his jacket.

  He’ll do what he needs to do. Then he’ll call her. Tell her where he is, what he’s doing.

  Tim watches his hands fumble with the latch of the gate. How many times has he stood in this spot, tinkered with this same recalcitrant clasp? Past and present merging like city and country. Last year’s cornfield sits next to a sign promising a new Costco and next year’s hottest housing development. The gate into the back was his preferred entrance to the darkened chilly house when he was a teenager. Through the gate and in past the sliding glass door that opened into the living room with a near silent swish.
Not that there was anybody who cared. Most of the time, his dad wasn’t even around. But sneaking in high and drunk at 3 am made it seem like his life was somehow—

  normal.

  What would that boy, spotty adolescent Timmy, make of this? Boy Timmy in his tree, watching the backyard and house, the scene set in perpetual gloom, a late-night TV test pattern. Tree-vee, Tim thinks. God he was fucked up back then. Sitting in that tree puffing on a pilfered cigarette, smoke ’em if you got ’em, another one of his father’s brilliant sayings. Drinking whatever he could find, he slowly drained an extensive collection of high-end liquors, diluting the bottles with water. Why did he bother with the water? His dad didn’t care or notice. Beige see-through Scotch wouldn’t fool anyone anyway. Eventually Timmy drank that too. Boozy bilge water. He left the empty bottles to gather dust in the forest.

  Tim pushes at the gate. Is it locked? No it’s the same old latch. It always used to stick. Just gotta…lift the door up a bit.

  Ah. There.

  The gate opens with a rusty yawn. Tim takes a few steps into the backyard. He stops in the silence, listening as if remembering through the shrinking echo of past arrival: the gate’s dragging stutter, his grass-cushioned footsteps, the reverberations of his own ever-present breathing. By comparison the house seems silent. No sounds of digging or other indications of life, like TV dialogue or the quiet murmur of a couple going about their domestic evening routine. They’re asleep, Tim thinks. He has no idea what time it is. It feels late. He stands, facing the looming house. His father is dying.

  Tim pulls the ancient twisted pipe out of his pocket. After they got high, he took it from Charlie’s smoke lodge hideout. He holds it in his fist, this magic talisman, protection. He’s escaped. Or he hasn’t. He can’t forget that summer, their shared vigil, the way he watched for his mother’s return and saw only his father; his father restlessly prowling the circumference of that perfect patch of new grass. Tim was afraid, back then, afraid his father would burst into his room in the middle of the night, drag him out into the backyard and make him disappear too. Afraid, though part of him wanted it to happen. It would have been a relief. It never happened. Instead, it was just his dad, mostly absent, then suddenly up in Tim’s face, trying too hard. Hey there ya are, Timmy bud! I ordered some pizza. There’s a ball game on! How’s school? C’mere ya little—don’t be such a stranger! Tim stares at the beckoning grey glint of that sliding glass door. He won’t go in. He doesn’t have to go in. Turn around, he thinks to himself. Do it.

  Behind him, the sloping backyard edges to a crumbling drop of tangled roots and protruding rocks. Behind him, the tree, his tree, sticks up out of the dark gap gorge, Tim’s forest gully home.

  A car passes on the street. It seems to slow. Then it drives on. Tim’s heart beats in his eardrums. He’s frozen again, trapped in memory’s scrutiny. The tree and the boy up in that tree peering down at him. Watching him. The house, too, is watching, dark glass of the back door unblinking, implacable.

  Finally, slowly, he turns.

  His hidden vantage point emerges above, looks naked and exposed. When you’re up there, you think you’re invisible. A murky chill breezes up from the gully. When Tim was a boy that cold air was everywhere, wending its way up through the backyard, up the stairs, under Tim’s closed bedroom door and right through him, no matter how many covers and blankets he layered on himself.

  That cold wind in his chest, a hollow he’ll never fill; a nebulous swirl of smoke coughed out and left behind. He stands in the backyard. This is where it happened. A blow to the back of the head. A lipstick smile flattening. A woman’s body slumping to stunned nothingness. The forest sways, beckons. He’ll bring her bones back to the ghost pines and the absent river hush and bury her in a wetland of unacknowledged pasts. He’ll dump her skull on the couch his father stole from their family home and watch the old man’s face crumble into nothing. The wind comes in gusts, branches creak overhead. Tim’s thighs quiver. What are you waiting for? He steps toward the tarp-covered hole.

  JUNE

  Thursday, April 17–Friday, April 18

  JUNE PRETENDED TO TAKE A SLEEPING PILL. It didn’t work. Norm gave it to her. Of course it didn’t work. She didn’t take it. She can’t. She might be—

  She should tell him. She should do what normal couples do. Wake him up, pee on a stick, hold his hand while they wait. It’s too early, she thinks, words zapping through her mind as she lies in bed next to her snoring husband. Lie, lies, lying. He knows. What does he know? After June came in from the backyard, staying out there just long enough to confirm that nobody had—that he was still—Norm had sat her down and very sternly asked her if she was alright. He’d asked her if she’d been having trouble sleeping. June said yes. He asked her why, what was bothering her? June looked at her hands. Norm sighed heavily. You don’t really think, June had finally said, that they’ll build that road? Norm didn’t answer, just squinted at her as if trying to see her better. He’d looked old, then, his face pulled in by worry and confusion.

  He gave her the pill. Kissed her forehead. Then, muttering something about goddamn bureaucrats, clearly still agitated from the meeting, he took one himself.

  Now he snores sonorously, sternly. June slips out of the covers. This is the last night, she promises herself. Then I’ll—

  tell him.

  She pulls on her jeans, her mud-smeared sweatshirt. She pads down the stairs and into the dark kitchen. She feels—strangely—unobserved. The feeling of someone—some other self—is absent. Her muscles ache slackly, devoid of pulsing electric tension, striated need. She doesn’t feel—him. Tonight she’s tired. She wants to sleep. She wants to be in the big warm bed, curled up under the down-filled duvet, her head on her husband’s shoulder.

  But she’s not done. Why not? she asks herself, feeling suddenly giddy with the idea. Reverse the process. Cover it all up. Instead of going straight out to the site, she lingers at the back sliding door, staring through the glass into the yard masked in moonlit cloud. Norm keeps asking her what she’s doing back there. He asked her again tonight, when she returned from the backyard to face his gentle inquisition. He’s not an idiot. He knows it’s not—June hasn’t been eating. Or sleeping, June thinks. Or cooking or shopping or doing the laundry or any of that shit. So no wonder he’s—

  He’s just trying to help. And suddenly she wants him to. Help her. Hold her. She thinks of smiley boy reporter, the community meeting, not even six hours ago but already a world away, red-haired lady and her piercing monotone—I’m Very Disturbed. The way the professor traced her palm with his stubby finger. The way Rose stared through her and into her. They know. They all know. Of course they don’t. Not really. They can’t. But—

  If she covers it up. Then they won’t—

  They’ll come for him, June thinks. She can’t let that happen. She won’t let that happen. June puts her hands on the glass, feels the cold against her palms. The backyard looks barren. Where is he? Where did he go? She doesn’t want this to be about her. Am I really so—

  Jesus. Jesus June. So she’s lonely? So Wississauga is just a big sprawling nothing? So what?

  And if there’s life growing inside her? It doesn’t seem real. One long waking dream. The big trees sway. What goes on above? What goes on underneath? Invisible demarcations, ageless patterned movements marking the microscopic shifts from life to death and back again. June closes her eyes. She’s tired, that’s all. The window glass feels cold on her palms. She’s so tired. She curls her hands into fists, raps them gently, rhythmically, against the glass door. It’s a beat deep inside her, primal and unconscious. She realizes it’s the same sound she’s been hearing in her head, the same rhythm she’s been reflexively moving to while working in the hole. The glass trembles. She hits harder. For a moment she thinks she’ll smash right through. That’ll wake Norm up. He already thinks she’s losing it. She just wanted him to—

  Jesus June. You’re pathetic.

  The only problem
is that everyone believes it. You believe it, don’t you? And Rose, and Professor Nordstrom, and that horrible reporter, and buckskin lady. They all believe it. They all want to believe it. Why shouldn’t they? Isn’t it true? Tonight, June isn’t sure. A cold hole in the ground. No one there. No one watching her. June leans her forehead against the window, feels the shudder as she bangs the glass gently, persistently, following a song lost in the pulse of her heart.

  When she opens her eyes again, there’s a shadow over her view. June freezes, her fists distending against the glass. A man is staring in. June gasps. But he doesn’t seem to see her. He gazes through and past, like she’s not even there. He’s scraggly, his pale face dotted with patches of wispy beard. Young guy, June registers, he can’t even grow a beard. He’s wearing an army surplus jacket. The jacket’s too big for him. It hangs off his skinny frame, a tattered shirt handed down to a scarecrow. June breathes again. He isn’t particularly intimidating. Why doesn’t he see me?

  Get out of here, June thinks. Go. She feels the blood rushing, her cheeks wet with rage. The hole, the bones, the wet messy truth beneath the earth. After what seems like an eternity, the man-boy finally turns away to face the sloping spread of the backyard. Don’t you dare. She should call Norm, call the police. She unlocks the door and gently slides the glass open. Man-boy stands at the edge, peering down at the plastic tarp cover. June steps up behind him. She wishes she had something—a rock, a club, a spear to press into his knobby back. Her hands are empty. He’s lanky, tall, has a couple of feet on her. He stinks of sweat and smoke and something else, some underground odour June can’t place but immediately feels overcome by. She gasps, suddenly short of air. The stranger turns slowly, as if only slightly curious about who or what is behind him. He stares at her with hazy bloodshot eyes. He’s high, June thinks.

  My husband’s upstairs, June says firmly. She isn’t afraid of him. Slowly, deliberately, never taking her eyes off him, she bends her knees and gropes for the handle of the heavy shovel. Tim blinks flatly, doesn’t seem to notice.