The Anomaly

by Michael Rutger

  “The spot I’ve asked you to head for—have you had anybody ask to go there before?”

  He shook his head. “Nah. It’s a new one on me, to be—”

  “Great,” I said. “Can’t wait to get started. But before we do, I’ve got to ask something that I know a lot of our viewers will be keen to know.”

  “Fire away.”

  “What’s the precise water displacement of the raft, in cubic inches?”

  He blinked at me. “What?”

  “Or centimeters, if that’s easier.”

  “I don’t…know.”

  I laughed. “And who cares, right? But something we really should be aware of, as we set off—that first European voyage down this section of the Colorado River. What year was it?”

  “Um,” he said.

  I let the pause settle deep, and stood looking at him, an expression of immense serenity on my face.

  After five very long seconds of this, Pierre sighed and ostentatiously stopped filming.

  “It was May 24 through August 30, 1869,” I said. “John Wesley Powell. No biggie. Might be a nice fact to share with your next group of tourists, though, right? What with re-creating part of Powell’s landmark journey being…your actual job?”

  Dylan coughed. “Can I try another question?”

  “No,” Ken said curtly. “We need to get on the water. And we’re a one-take style of operation, mate. Something that Nolan nails time after time.”

  “Sorry.”

  “Don’t worry,” I said, clapping Dylan on the shoulder and smiling kindly. “You’ll get used to it. Probably.”

  He slunk off toward the boat. Pierre discreetly gave me a fist bump, and Ken winked.

  Let it be known that I can wave my own penis around, should the need arise.

  Chapter

  8

  One of the things I like about my so-called job is that it makes me do things I normally wouldn’t. Most writers (and even ex-writers) are lazy asses, physically at least. Sure, there are exceptions, like Hemingway, who’d leave the house to shoot something or get macho on a big fish, but I’ll bet even he was far happier back at home propping up the bar or on the porch communing with his cats in short, declarative sentences.

  As discussed with Gemma, I somehow hadn’t gotten around to visiting the Grand Canyon before. And now I was not only here, but cruising along the Colorado River more than a mile below the rest of the world, wearing a life jacket and periodically rowing and generally doing the thing. We sat in three rows, Ken and I at the back like a pair of schoolboys. I could tell that Dylan felt the team wasn’t taking the process seriously enough, but he was still sufficiently cowed by the filming incident that he didn’t seem inclined to give anyone grief. Yet.

  It was already midafternoon and the sun was turning the jagged walls of the canyon some pretty glorious shades of red, orange, and brown. Much of this was organized in horizontal striations, but there were patches of mineral staining across it, and vertical lines, too. The lower stretches were sparsely dotted with shrubs and small, gnarled trees. Broken rocks led down to the river, about sixty feet wide at this point, and thirty feet deep. It truly felt like being on another planet.

  Later I’d be doing another to-camera segment concerning our route, but I’d keep it short. Partly to maintain the air of mystery—and pay lip service to Kincaid’s circumspect description of his expedition, which genuinely did strike me as intriguing. Also because frankly I couldn’t remember why I’d decided this was where we should be looking. I’d mapped out the general area by triangulating five different articles I’d found on the web, all written with the brain-searing turgidity of people who find detail very interesting indeed. I have many fine qualities (I imagine) but a rigorous attention to detail is not one of them.

  So far, so good. To complicate matters, however, I’d gone on to decide that the researchers/speculators whose work I’d been collating/stealing had missed further subtle references in the original text, which to me (under the influence, I’ll confess, of a certain amount of alcohol, along with some killer pot sold to me by the Latvian woman who cleans my apartment, which is a story I’d prefer not to get into) implied that Kincaid had been sowing a false trail. I had in my possession (in a virtual sense—I’d photographed it and kicked the pics up to my Evernote database) the huge piece of paper on which I’d sketched and calculated and diagrammed until I had my own speculative location for the cavern. It looked like the kind of thing the cops discover nailed to the garage wall of some guy they’ve just arrested on suspicion of multiple grisly homicides over a decade-long campaign of terror, but it made sense at the time. Sort of.

  I had it narrowed down to a four-hundred-yard stretch of the river—an unremarkable portion of backwater up a side canyon that had attracted no interest from anyone whatsoever—where the water was both unusually wide and unusually deep.

  But first, we had to get there.

  After an hour of gently cruising, the raft started to go far more quickly, for no obvious reason, at first.

  “Are we getting close to the rapids?”

  “Ya,” Dylan said. “You all might want to hold on.”

  The raft jumped another notch in speed and was whipped around a bend, and suddenly the river looked very different. Instead of an open, calm course, it had narrowed to less than a third of the previous width and was strewn with big rocks, the current varying markedly as it cut around them—but all going very fast.

  Before any of us had time to get used to this we were being thrown chaotically from side to side, the raft briefly airborne, slapping back into the water with a bone-juddering thump—and then there was another huge bounce that took the right side of the raft two feet higher than the left.

  And suddenly Feather wasn’t in the boat anymore.

  “Shit!” Dylan shouted.

  He started bellowing instructions, trying to get the raft to a calmer section toward the left side as he stared wildly around for Feather. He seemed extremely disconcerted—which didn’t help the rest of us.

  “Where is she?” Molly shouted back. “Where—”

  But then we saw her. Swimming alongside us, cresting the currents easily, deftly avoiding a big boulder’s attempt to flip her over, and then cutting back through the water toward the boat with strong, measured strokes.

  Pierre reached a hand down and she grabbed it and was back in the raft in a moment, grinning from ear to ear.

  “Again, again,” she said.

  After a few more minutes of extreme bumpiness there were no more rocks. The river widened and the water slowly returned to a more normal pace. Feather looked disappointed.

  “You okay?” I asked.

  “Okay? That was awesome. Dylan—are there more rapids coming up today?”

  “No. And look, when I say hold on tight, hold on tight. I’m here to make sure you don’t die, ya?”

  I winked at Ken. “Ah well. Shame not to get the shot of me falling in that I suspect you were hoping for.”

  “Yeah,” he said. “But there’s always next time. You can run, mate, but you can’t hide.”

  Chapter

  9

  This is a bit more like it.”

  It was early evening and Ken and I were sitting in rickety camp chairs on a small patch of beach, fifty yards long and half that deep, in a portion of the canyon where the wall sloped gently before shooting back up into the sky. The opposite side was sheer right down to the water, but the fading rays of the sun bounced off the rim, far, far above, hazing out the sky and setting the walls alight.

  It was a heck of a view. Adding to our sense of comfort was the fact we were pretty full. In addition to the camp chairs and three tiny tents stowed on the boat—immediately allotted, without recourse to speech or discussion, to the women present: I could see Gemma considering whether this constituted gender fascism of a virulence worth resisting and deciding nuts to that, it would get cold in the night—Dylan had unpacked a portable grill. Once we’d settled in and go
tten the tents up he started wielding tongs and spatula and produced skewers of lamb and chicken from a cooler, and the smell of these cooking in the pure air was enough to provoke audible noises of anticipation from people’s stomachs.

  Of course, that kind of food always tastes better in the outdoors and when you’re on something of an adventure, but it turned out Dylan had spent a year as a personal chef somewhere in the Mediterranean and genuinely knew what he was doing. Even Feather, who was—naturally—vegan, seemed satisfied, as there were containers of non-amateur salads available, too. She was still chowing down on kale and quinoa, her nose and forehead glowing red from the day’s sun, long after the rest of us had staggered away from the table.

  It further transpired that Ken had firmly stipulated that this not be a dry expedition, and so a number of bottles of vodka had found their way into a dedicated cooler. He and I were, therefore, slowly getting blasted.

  “It’s not crap,” I agreed.

  “What’s the deal with the colors?”

  The view was changing minute by minute, the last rays of sun highlighting striations of red, orange, and brown in the walls and the boulders, large and small, strewn over the slope on either side of the beach. “Mineral deposits.”

  “I know that, you tosser. I meant, isn’t there something we’re supposed to be looking for tomorrow?”

  “A lot of the wall up and down this stretch of Marble Canyon is made up of an aggregate called Vishnu Schist, two billion years old and originally ten miles underground. So in the process it got heavily compressed and is therefore relatively dense, and a darkish brown color. That’s not what we want to be seeing. Kincaid mentioned sedimentary layers near the site of the cavern, and specifically refers to ‘stains’ about halfway up the wall. Along here, that basically limits us to a five-mile section.”

  “Five miles is a lot of rock to stare at.”

  “I narrowed it down to about a quarter of a mile, and that’s the location Molly passed to Dylan. He reckons we’ll get there late morning.”

  He winked. “Big day tomorrow, then. Should be exploring the cavern by lunchtime.”

  “Ha, ha.”

  Later, having successfully said things while Pierre pointed a camera at me, I was sitting by myself on a rock, drinking coffee and smoking a contemplative cigarette, when I heard someone approaching.

  “Don’t worry,” Gemma said. “I’m not wearing my investigative journalist hat. Just looks like you’ve found a good spot to sit.”

  I moved up so she could perch a couple of feet away, and for a while we looked along the dark canyon together, listening to the sound of cold water.

  “I did want to ask something, though,” she said.

  “How confrontational is it, on a scale of one to ten?”

  “Only about a two. Mysteries. What’s the appeal? To you, I mean. And don’t feed me that ‘it matters only that we seek’ crapola. Most of the stuff you cover—let’s face it, there’s never going to be an answer. Isn’t that kind of frustrating?”

  “No,” I said. “Once you’re in possession of a fact, you’re done. Case closed. Mind closed, too. Unresolvable mysteries expand the mind.”

  “I don’t see how. Truth is what shows us new things.”

  “But there’s never just one truth. You threw Noah’s Ark at me earlier—so take flood myths as an example. They appear all over the world with remarkable consistency. You can’t just ignore that. You need to try to find an explanation.”

  “So try one on me.”

  “I’ll give you three. First, you could claim it’s evidence of historicity, a real flood in ancient times—a catastrophe on a scale so massive it was recorded in oral histories all over the world, histories that gradually morphed into myth.”

  “But for which people have found zero evidence, right?”

  “Actually they have, but only ones outside the mainstream—because it makes you sound like you’re trying to prove the Bible, which consigns you straight to nut-job status. But sure, ignore their decades of research, though at least acknowledge that the end of the last ice age affected sea levels worldwide, wiping out coastal villages and covering previously inhabited regions like Doggerland in the North Sea. So instead you cite these localized rises in water level—for which there is demonstrable, science-friendly evidence in places like Iraq and the Persian Gulf, the heart of civilization ten thousand years ago. On the back of which you speculate that the universality of a flood myth suggests ancient migrations caused the movement of legends around the world. You don’t get the global superflood, but you do get the idea that the peoples of prehistory were far more mobile than conventional archeology is prepared to admit.”

  She appeared to consider this idea seriously.

  “Worst case,” I went on, “you go Jungian and speculate that the idea of a flood (always framed as a result of mankind’s behavior provoking divine retribution—as in the Bible, the Epic of Gilgamesh, the Koran, and the Mesopotamian Epic of Atrahasis) represents an archetypal fear universally resident in the human psyche. That it’s a metaphor for the cyclical collapse of societal forms, followed by a period of chaos, and the gradual establishment of a new paradigm in the aftermath. And why are you grinning like that?”

  “When you’re on a roll, you’re not too dumb-sounding. It’s disconcerting.”

  “My point is any or all of these explanations might be true—and reveal something eye-opening about humankind. Yet ‘science’ downgrades Noah’s Ark and all other myths to the level of ‘made-up shit from before we had computers.’ That’s what pisses me off. Science is supposed to be the revealer and leveler—but it’s become a religion. ‘Shut up and believe our “truth”—even if it flies in the face of long-established traditions, and half of it is funded by vested interests or dictated by fashion. Oh, and we reserve the right to change our mind next year. And then again the year after that.’ Because…science.”

  “But people in the past got stuff wrong, too,” she said. “Like thinking the Earth was flat until the Middle Ages.”

  “Nope. Herodotus was kicking holes in that idea back in 500 BC. The flat-Earth idea was a fake put about by science fanboys like Washington Irving and Andrew Dickson White—to ‘prove’ religion’s dogmas needed defeating.”

  “Ah, the dreaded conspiracy at work once more.”

  “Make fun if you like. But to me it’s the height of arrogance to dismiss thousands of years of folk knowledge through an evangelical adherence to scientific paradigms that remain theories rather than facts. Our species didn’t suddenly start being smart a hundred years ago.”

  There was a sound from behind, and we turned to see Feather standing on a rock close by, feet neatly together, clapping.

  “Bravo,” she said.

  I shrugged modestly—wishing only that Ken or Molly had been there to see me Conspicuously Pleasing Our Sponsor.

  And that I could remember what I’d just said.

  From the files of Nolan Moore:

  MARBLE CANYON, EARLY PHOTOGRAPH (date unknown)

  Chapter

  10

  Holy crap it was cold in the night.

  The sleeping bags just about made it bearable, so long as you curled up like a grub and stayed absolutely still long enough for trapped body heat to build. I drifted off quickly—the day had featured a level of exercise wholly alien to what I like to think of as my “lifestyle”—but woke within an hour to anxious bleating from my nose and cheeks.

  When I woke for the third time I sat up and smoked, giving my eyes enough time to adjust to the darkness, and realized that Pierre and Dylan had taken the obvious step of pulling their heads down inside the sleeping bags. Ken hadn’t, but he was carrying a ton of vodka inside him and likely feeling no pain.

  So I tried the head-inside technique, and managed to get a couple of fitful hours. I was awake again at four thirty, waiting for the sun to rise and turn the walls of the canyon three-dimensional. In the meantime I looked up at the stars, so sharp that thei
r light seemed almost blue.

  Just before the dawn I realized I wasn’t the only person awake. It’s strange how you can tell. I turned my head, expecting to see Molly up on her feet, getting an early start on the day in the organized and can-do way she has.

  But she wasn’t.

  Nobody was, in fact. I could see all the other members of the team, either still zipped up inside mini tents or curled up in sleeping bags.

  And yet it felt strongly as if I wasn’t alone.

  I looked around again, slowly panning my gaze across the small beach and over the rocky areas on either side. Nobody there. Of course. We were a long way from anywhere. It wasn’t possible for another person to be here.

  Here, and watching me. Watching us.

  I remembered a final Hopi legend, one that I hadn’t included in my spiel to camera before we started down the trail. A story that somewhere within the Grand Canyon lies a deep, hidden cave that is home to their god Maasaw, the “keeper of death”—and that’s why portions of the canyon have long been associated with accidents and anxiety attacks.

  I hadn’t included this tale because I was sure—as Powell himself had been—that it was their way of keeping people out of a sacred site, and there was no truth in it beyond that.

  Nonetheless, I was glad when it was properly light.

  Eventually other people started to stir. Dylan first, who nodded in my direction and got on with filling the cold air with the smell of cooking bacon. A little banter around the grill the night before had improved relations between the males in the group, and I was considering giving him a few nontaxing moments on camera at some point today.

  Hollow eyes among my fellow crew members told me I wasn’t the only person who’d suffered a patchy night. The tents the women had slept in hadn’t helped much with the dead-of-night temperatures. Ken looked the same as usual, but he usually looks like shit—albeit a robust type of shit that stands up and holds out his hand for a cup of coffee and starts dealing with the world as if waking with sand in your hair at the bottom of the Grand Canyon is business as usual.