by Camilla Gibb
In reality, Emma was squatting, as she had squatted every morning for the past couple of weeks now, with a used toothbrush between her forefinger and thumb, sweeping dust off a fragment of pottery that was meaningless in the grand field of discovery: a piece of Dutch porcelain, circa 1929. She squatted alongside fourteen other students, engaged in the tedious and uninspired motions of scraping, teasing, and flossing, most of them restraining the urge to dig tunnels to the Antipodes. From above, they looked like ants labouring in a field under the dictatorial leadership of an anteater with a clipboard and a Ph.D.
They didn’t begin the day with espresso, or end the day with tequila, they began bleary-eyed every not-quite-yet-morning and finished leaden-headed by the end of each exhausting sun-soaked day. But Emma nevertheless began and ended the day with fire in her eyes, scribbling her notes on the subway every morning, oblivious to the fact that she was sandwiched between a bunch of blank-faced people on their way to jobs they clearly hated.
After six hours of digging, they would all sit down to eat soggy egg salad and tuna fish sandwiches on white bread, and moan about tired shoulders and sunburns before packing themselves up to shuffle wearisome and wordlessly back to their homes in the city.
Among them, Emma stood out, engaging Professor Rocker in conversation, questioning him about context and dating techniques. It made her a butt-kisser in the eyes of the other students, but Professor Rocker would have to give her full marks for effort. She was obviously passionate about the subject, but since this particular situation was nothing but sheer drudgery, he could see she suffered from a syndrome that commonly afflicted novices. He was charmed by this kind of naïve enthusiasm, it made him feel hopeful, it made him feel young again, but he knew it was only a matter of weeks before she discovered the truth: archaeology was a fundamentally boring and predictable occupation which required patience and commitment above all else. It was much more like a marriage than a shipboard romance, and in his twenty years of teaching, he’d seen many of the most enthusiastic fling themselves overboard in the end.
But Professor Rocker couldn’t know that Emma’s convictions were not simply born of idealized notions about archaeology. If that were simply the case, they would be easy enough to dispel. What underlay them was a determination fuelled largely by anger and sadness. Dreams born of a need to escape, passions inflamed by a desperate desire to reinvent herself, invest life with meaning, and bury the bad of the past. Professor Rocker had no idea what he was dealing with. Her romance floated on a ship the size of the Titanic.
Even on her way home on the subway, Emma scribbled notes in her dusty lab book. She attempted to make an overall sketch of the site but failed, because she’d never been artistic, she’d never had perspective. Blue did, not because he’d been taught, but because he just did. She envied that. She flipped to the last page of her notebook and scribbled him a letter.
I wish I could show you the place where I’m digging. It just looks like boring suburbs on the surface, there’s no life to speak of above ground, but if you’re patient, you can find it buried in the dirt. You’d get it, if I could show you. If I could, I’d stretch a big canvas between here and there and paint you a picture large enough to bridge the distance. But you’re the artist in the family, I’m just the dreamer, and even that can’t help me visualize you out there among mountains.
Ruthie was in the kitchen on their floor of their residence stirring a pot of something that smelled far too exotic for the surroundings. She was stirring blindly, reading from a textbook lying open on the chopping block. She was studying hard all summer, determined to write her MCATs in the fall.
“You look like you’ve had a good day,” she said to Emma who was looking goofy with a big smile cracking her face.
“He’s really good, this Professor Rocker. He makes us sort it out for ourselves.”
“No spoon-feeding,” Ruthie nodded. “Speaking of which. Open up your grinning gob and taste this—” Ruthie held out a steaming spoon.
“That’s delicious.”
“Guyanese recipe.”
“What’s in it?”
“Coconut milk, chicken, chili pepper, coriander, and a secret Guyanese sauce.”
“What’s the secret sauce called?”
“Heinz ketchup.”
Emma laughed as Ruthie ladled some of the stew into a bowl for her. Dinner. Ruthie had left it for her on other occasions. A note on the fridge: “Green bowl, nuke it for four minutes.” Ruthie had more innate sense than Emma’s mother of how to make a home.
After dinner, in her narrow, sepia-stained room, Emma tore the letter to Blue out of her notebook, and folded it around a couple of pictures she’d taken of herself. On the back of them she wrote: “I am somebody else.”
She took her dying fern into the shower with her, and watched dirt fall into a puddle at her feet. Every night she watched a brown puddle accumulate as she shed her dusty skin. Shower after shower, the dirt under her nails remained. There was even mud in the sink when she brushed her teeth. She was so tired that minutes after she’d crawled into bed, she fell asleep. Ruthie, whose room was next door, silently came and picked her lab book off her stomach, turned off her light, and shut her door. Emma slept on uninterrupted, dreaming ribbons of dirt and burial and the dead.
The next morning, she slid the letter to Blue under Ruthie’s door with a note attached. “Ruthie, I’m sorry to ask, but if you have time today, can you stick this in an envelope and mail it to my brother? I appreciate it. Have a good day. Em.”
Ruthie picked up the letter when she woke up and dutifully put it in an envelope. She looked at the pictures, and decided no one would know if one them was missing. She took the prettier one of Emma, smoothed its creased edge, and stuck it in the back of her biochemistry textbook alongside a recent photo of her parents.
The Invisible Sister
Yet another morning alongside her colleagues under the relentless rising sun where they continued to make tiny gestures with grand implications. They were almost a month of the way into it and there were those who suffered sunstroke and dehydration and those who started to lose it, muttering inane words and nursery rhymes to themselves as they mashed their fingers against rocks. They sent one young man from Australia packing after he started eating dirt. Oy, mate. You’ve got gravel on your lips again.
The tougher her skin grew, the tighter her muscles pulled, the more Emma’s imagination soared. There was silence in the dirt: wide room for reflection. In the rhythm of work she found a sense of innocence and awe that she could only associate with the colour of sunshine in her childhood bedroom and the sight of Blue’s face when she brought him a book on Picasso. Rare moments when the world had felt large and full of promise.
She wanted to recall that feeling, re-enact the play, draw out the middle section, the one where they laughed, and rewrite the ending so that the Oliver didn’t always get the final say. There’d be no big bolt of lightning, no curtain that fell so heavily at the end that all that had come before was erased. It would be one delightful act from start to finish, with Audrey Hepburn playing Elaine, and Johnny Depp cast as Blue, and, of course, a long fought-out battle between Jodie Foster and Winona Ryder for the part of Emma. There would be no casting call for Oliver’s part. Oliver would simply be a distant memory, a gravesite Audrey and Johnny and Jodie/Winona could all visit once a year on the anniversary of Oliver’s final soliloquy.
If only it were that easy. If someone leaves, is it because you are really better off without them anyway? Could Oliver really have gone postal? If he were registered mail, there’d be grounds to sue. As it was, there was no regulating body to complain to or blame. There was nowhere to take it, not even a grave. If he had vanished for good, they’d have to keep it in their bodies—swallow all the unanswerable questions whole, where they would fester in their stomachs and become phantom pregnancies—swollen bellies out of which nothing would ever be born. She and Blue were bound to be sterile—the possibility of the n
ext generation had long ago been killed.
After six weeks of work, exactly halfway through the dig, Professor Rocker took the remaining initiates to a musty old pub to celebrate. They drank pints of cold lager and ate pretzels and chicken wings and some of them stood to play a game of drunken darts. Emma monopolized the conversation between the remaining four at the table. Monopolized it to the extent that when she finally paused to take a breath it was just the two of them left there with a row of empty pint glasses between them. She kept asking Professor Rocker questions about his career and he kept denying that it was a life of glamour and intrigue.
“Come on,” she encouraged. “Tell me about something that you found that made you really feel it was all worthwhile.”
“I’ll tell you this, Emma,” he said, brightening. “I once worked on a site in Northern Ontario where we were trying to establish connections between the ancestral Huron in the area and natives in the Midwest. We had some knowledge of a historic relationship between them but no archaeological evidence from the pre-contact era.”
“Uh-huh,” said Emma enthusiastically.
“Well, we hadn’t come up with anything after three months of excavation and, well, to tell you the truth, I was getting bored.”
“I can imagine.”
“So I slumped myself down one afternoon on a hillside and started to do some sketches. Hobby of mine. I was sketching the flora around the site, doing so pretty mindlessly, until it dawned on me that some of the plants might not have been indigenous to Ontario. Sumpweed, for instance, and chenopod.”
“Yeah?” said Emma, not seeing the point.
“Well, sure enough, I went and did a little research on my own and discovered that these were plants indigenous to the Midwest—plants that had been of particular social and economic importance in pre-contact times.”
“So you established a connection, and …?”
“So we established a connection based on the flora. The plants had obviously been carried from the Midwest to Northern Ontario.”
“And?”
“Well, that was the theory we came up with.”
“That’s it?” Emma asked. Surely there had to be more to it.
“Yes. It was considered an important development—establishing a connection based on flora. It hadn’t been done before.”
“Well, where did you take it from there?”
“I made it the subject of my Ph.D. thesis.”
“Wow,” said Emma, trying not to convey disappointment. “And what about after that? What else have you found that’s been of interest?”
“Well, nothing that hasn’t been discovered before. I’m afraid that a discovery like that is, in archaeological terms, sort of the highlight of one’s career.”
“I see,” she remarked, crestfallen.
“Emma, the odds against finding anything bigger or more unusual than that are incredibly rare. A ‘big discovery of a lifetime’ would be something like finding an unusual wear pattern on stone. Finding evidence to suggest that it might be possible that people cultivated maize as early as 9000 B.C., rather than 8750 B.C. as we currently believe.”
“You don’t get discouraged?”
“No. Because archaeology is about the details.”
“You don’t dream of finding something bigger?”
“Well, of course you always have hope that you’re going to be the one to make some huge discovery, but the big stuff is mostly intangible. You know, the big stuff, like religion. You’re not going to discover a religion; you’re going to unearth the tangible remnants of a form of worship. It’s actually a lot like life. You’re not going to find happiness or meaning. It’s in the details. The petty details, of yours, mine, whoever’s life, and how you make them all add up.”
“That’s kind of depressing,” Emma said.
“All depends how you look at it,” replied Professor Rocker, draining the last of his pint.
She made her way back to residence with the taste of disappointment in her mouth that night. It was as if Professor Rocker had put an aspirin on her tongue and told her to suck it. She was hoping the bitter pill would dissolve quickly even if it left a rancid aftertaste.
Her heart lifted a little at the sight of a letter from Blue. She pulled the grey envelope out of her mailbox in the porter’s lodge and tore it open.
“Another love letter?” the porter said, peering up at her from his newspaper.
“Hardly,” she replied, embarrassed.
She turned her back to the porter and skimmed Blue’s letter. His tone was rushed, elated even, not at all like Blue. The reason? He’d apparently met the girl of his dreams. Wait a minute—Blue’s in love?
“I’d shack up in Alberta, live in an igloo, become a Mormon, and grow strawberries for a living if that’s what she wanted,” he wrote. “It’s a crazy, crazy feeling!”
She wanted him to be happy, but she couldn’t help feeling slammed by his news. Blue was far enough away already, and with this declaration, he was migrating that much further. She could feel herself slipping into the distance on his horizon. He was waving to her, cheerfully, obliviously, his spirits lifted by new arms, while she was foraging on all fours in the dirt, looking for sumpweed.
Emma moaned aloud with the weight of a falling heart.
The porter looked up from his newspaper and stared at her.
“What?” she said abruptly.
“Nothing,” the porter replied, startled.
“Did I say something?”
“Something about feeling blue.”
The next morning, she pulled her overalls over her shorts and T-shirt, and put on a sweatshirt over the entire bulk. She rushed past the porter’s desk and travelled across and out the other side of the city.
Blue’s declaration of love sent her head and heart first into the dirt with renewed, nearly manic conviction. Whatever she was digging for, she was going to find it. There was nowhere else for her to go.
Later that day, Emma sat beneath a tree in the courtyard of the residence under the orange sun. Frisbees floated and sprinklers punctured holes in the humid air. A baseball game was under way at the far end of the adjacent field. She was a spectre against the backdrop of summer hoots and hollers, a stranger, a foreigner, writing field notes in her lab book, sketching a bad approximation of another fragment of pottery they’d unearthed that day.
“Dear Blue,” she wrote in the last page of her lab book and leaned back against the tree. She stuck the end of the pen in her mouth then because she didn’t know what else to write.
“Booly boo?” she called out, looking up. “Where are you?” The words travelled across the country, slammed into the Rockies, and came back to her as an echo: “Boo hoo.” He couldn’t hear her, there were giant obstacles in the way, he was too far away for telepathy, perhaps even too far for understanding.
They’d spent an entire winter trying to communicate telepathically when they were children. At home, before they fell asleep, they would synchronize their watches and agree that at precisely nine o’clock, Emma would purge her head of all thoughts and try and listen in to his. It didn’t seem to work, nor did it work the other way around, where Blue went blank and invited her thoughts into his head. They just weren’t conversant in the sixth sense, no matter how hard they wished or tried.
She lingered at the lonely edge of that echo. He couldn’t hear her, and if that were true, was she still his sister? She wasn’t sure.
I used to share a life with you—do you remember? A life like a bed that was more than big enough for two people, or at least the two of us. I don’t understand what happened. When did the cement that used to bind our foundations crack? I feel it, Blue—like the foundations have buckled and split down the middle and you’re standing on one side of the ocean and I’m over here in some weird wasteland and I don’t even look like you or me or anybody I recognize when I look in the mirror now. I can’t even picture you any more. Where are you? Are we just playing hide-and-seek? Am I it?
If I am, can it be your turn now?
Love,
Emma
The Snake and the Butterfly
His sister sounded like she was cracking up. He had just received a letter from her and the envelope was full of dirt and cigarette ash. He didn’t really know what she was yammering on about in her letter, though he suspected she was in the midst of another one of her identity crises. She was asking him where he was. Saying they’d drifted apart. But she was the one who had left and moved to Andrew’s. She was the one who had decided to go off to university and become an archaeologist. There was distance between them because every time she went off to try and be someone else she had thrown the baby out with the dirty bathwater of the life they had lived that far.
Now he was busy trying to have his own life and she was asking him where the hell he was. So he’d tell her. He was in Banff and he was in love with a woman named Amy. “She’s amazing,” he wrote. This one was for real. There had been a string of one-night stands when he first got to Banff, a couple of mistakes, including one bearing a minor, but contagious infection, but this one-night stand had lasted for two weeks already, and it was spilling more and more into the daylight hours.
Amy was a stripper, and she worked at the Heavenly Bawdy, a strip joint beneath a restaurant on the road to the next town. The official name of the place was Jingles Singles Club—for members only—a respectable front for the questionable activities that went on behind its doors. The place was occasionally raided for minors and drugs, so the manager, Larry, had a system. If the music suddenly looped from bump and grind into Billy Holiday, the strippers would sit down at tables with the clients and make like they were simply looking for husbands. A drag queen would come onstage and mouth “Summertime,” and the happily pretending and not-so-happily pretending would dance cheek to cheek around the parquet floor. The Jingles Singles Club.
In and amongst the crowd on any given night there would be at least a couple of Mounted Police. You could tell, because despite being unmounted while in attendance, they still had manure on their boots. They paid like anyone else, even though what went on was completely against the edicts of the strictly guarded business regulations in the National Park.