Easter Island!—I feared you’d dropped off the face of the earth (forwarding address with the p.o. next time? or a phone number? Do they even have phones there?). When I heard about Thomas I tried to get hold of you. Looks like somebody didn’t want to be gotten hold of. They should let you run the Witness Protection program! Anyway, I ought to offer my condolences.
If you’re ever passing through Strasbourg you must come say hi. The pâté is divine, the wine, primo. No scuba diving here, but I gave that up anyway ’cause I slipped a disc. I smoke, I don’t know, about five packs a day. I’m happy.
I’ve thought of you often, you know. Please visit.
All good wishes,
Josephine (French pals insist—I kind of like it now) Banks
P.S. You should think of going by Dr. Sandor. When I saw Dr. Farraday on the analysis request form, I nearly had a heart attack. Also, have you heard about the National Geo expedition to Surtsey in February? Right up your alley. They’re looking for palynologists.
Greer sat on the bed and set the letter beside her. She tugged off her boots, peeled off her damp shirt, and looked again at the piece of paper. Jo. Greer thought she’d never hear from her again, that Jo had given up on her. Greer had never blamed her for this, knowing how hard it must have been for Jo to see her accused of plagiarism, humiliated in front of the whole department. Jo, who without a moment’s doubt knew what Thomas had done and then had to watch Greer’s stubborn denial. Jo must have known her accusation of Thomas would be suspect, that the simple act of defending a friend might seem the jealousy of a spurned lover. In the end, Jo had no choice but to let Greer figure it out on her own. She probably hadn’t thought it would take Greer five years.
Greer looked at Jo’s signature, the familiar handwriting. This unexpected hello should have made Greer happy, but sitting in the small room where she’d spent the past few months, she felt suddenly edgy. The note brought back too much, too suddenly. Jo, Thomas, the dissertation. Things she’d come here to get away from. That whole part of her life in Madison now seemed incomprehensible. Ever since Thomas’s death, the question plagued her: How hadn’t she seen it? Why hadn’t she realized his betrayal? She was an intelligent woman; she’d graduated summa cum laude from college, had a Ph.D. in botany and palynology. Yet when the evidence was presented, she simply turned away.
Greer looked at the letter once more, folded it, and slid it back in its envelope. She could feel the ache in her limbs, but wouldn’t be able to sleep now. She didn’t want to lie in the bed whispering taxonomy to herself.
Instead, she changed clothes and went to find Burke-Jones.
The laboratory was dark. Vicente and Sven, worn out, had gone back to their hotels to sleep, and perhaps Burke-Jones, too, was back at the Espíritu. But his silence at the moment she’d last seen him made Greer think otherwise. She turned on the lights and peeked into his room. Everything was in order, but no sign of him. As she now stepped across the threshold, she saw, for the first time, the full scope of his constructed world. The long table against the far wall was just the beginning. Perpendicular to either side of the room, six small tables each displayed their own green papier-mâché islands, smallmoai enmeshed with dental floss and toothpicks. In some places the statues were propped up with piles of jellybeans. She ran her fingertips along one’s head, the same grainy texture as the real statues—volcanic tuff. Had Burke-Jones paid a carver to make hundreds ofmoai the size of soda cans? Or had he carved them himself, as he’d so meticulously built everything else?
She walked through the labyrinth of alternate universes—the differences between each were subtle. In some themoai were only slightly more upright than in others, and then she realized: chronology. Here was the history of the island laid out on all the tables in the room. On the final table he had included the toppledmoai, a barren landscape of fallen statues.
Greer flicked off the lights and went back outside. The air was cool now, the sky dark, and she made her way toward the village with her flashlight. She stopped into the Hotel Espíritu, and was told by a groggy Elian, the night watch, that Burke-Jones hadn’t yet returned. Elian lifted an invisible glass to his mouth and swigged. “Señor Burke-Jones drink, I believe.”
Greer left the hotel and cut toward the main street—no sign of him. Heading out of town she spotted his Jeep beside the road to the old leper colony. She followed the path to where the moon lit the semicircle of abandoned huts. She saw a figure seated beside one of them.
“Randolph?”
There was no response, but as she moved closer she saw that it wasn’t Burke-Jones at all, but Luka Tepano.
He sat with his knees bent to his chest, his arms wrapped around his legs, and his hands folded atop his shoes. His chin was tucked, but he now looked up.
“I saw you by themoai today,” she said. This was the first she’d spoken to him. “Habla usted inglés?I’m looking for a friend. The British engineer. The man who arranged the experiment.”
He offered a half-smile, but Greer wasn’t sure if he understood. He let his chin rest on his knees. He was old, his face deeply seamed but perfectly shaven. His thick hair was neatly parted, and despite the shabbiness of his clothes, he seemed well groomed. There was a quiet dignity to the way he sat. He was apparently lost in thought. If Burke-Jones had come this way, she doubted Luka Tepano had noticed him.
“Iorana,”she said, and made her way back toward the coast, continuing farther along the path, toward the cemetery—the same route she’d taken her first week on the island. There, among the scattered crosses, she saw him.
“Randolph, it’s Greer. I’ve just come to see if you’re all right.”
She moved closer to the crosses, white against the black sky, daisies and nasturtiums scattered before them.
He was leaning against a headstone, his hands in his lap, serene. “Look.” He tilted his head back. “One. Two. Three. Four. The Southern Cross.”
Greer looked up at the blizzard of stars. “There are some advantages to having few streetlights,” she said.
She sat down beside him. The cross before her read:Te Haha Huke. 1864–1922. Born in 1864, the year the missionaries arrived, long after the lastmoai had fallen.
“Listen, Randolph, there’s something in my work that could be of help to you. Not just theTriumfetta semitriloba trees, but palm trees,” she said. “There may have been some sort of palm tree on the island. I have fossil pollen from a plant that would have covered this whole island when the settlers arrived, but there’s no known match. I suspect palm, a good researcher in Strasbourg suspects palm; but I don’t know the exact species. There are an endless number of properties it could have displayed, so without knowing the species, it won’t tell us much about island life. But there was more here than theSophora toromiro. That I’m sure of.”
“Fine.”
“They had more than rope,” she said. “Do you see what I’m getting at?”
He shifted toward her now, his face peaceful—she thought he was about to answer, but he pressed his mouth to hers. His lips were warm and dry and moved tenderly against hers. Greer could sense her body’s curiosity at this forgotten intimacy.
“I’m sorry,” he said, pulling away.
“It’s all right, Randolph.” She sat back against the headstone. It was her first kiss in almost a year, her first kiss with anyone but Thomas in a decade. She felt strange.
“Have you ever seen Lydia?” he asked. He slowly retrieved from his back pocket a wallet stuffed with small scraps of paper. Without a moment’s search he extracted one small photograph, its edges worn; in the dark Greer could vaguely discern the face of a woman. “Lydia,” he said.
“She’s beautiful,” said Greer, holding the picture before her as though the image were clear. “A beautiful woman.”
“She once read about Easter Island. A book with pictures. And do you know what she said? She said, ‘Randolph, I wonder how they moved those giant things.’ ” He took the photo back and slid it into
the wallet. “Enough of that.”
“Randolph,” said Greer, standing. “You should go home and sleep.” She held out her hands and he clasped them—he sprung from the ground, so much lighter than the statue she’d spent the day trying to budge.
They drove in silence back to Hanga Roa, leaving the Jeep in the street. At the Hotel Espíritu, Elian emerged with a grin, no doubt imagining Greer had found Burke-Jones dead drunk in the road. He rushed forward to catch his arm and guide him inside.
Greer then headed back toward Mahina’s, past the other small hotels, theresidenciales; she looked at the lines of light filtering through wooden shutters, and wondered if behind those windows were other people like Burke-Jones, who had come to this island in search of some impossible answer. At the sign for the Residencial Ao Popohanga, Greer turned left, toward the road that cut to the southern coast. It was almost ten, but she wasn’t yet ready to go back to her room, to the letter, to a reminder of what she’d lost.
When Thomas’s fraud was exposed, he resigned his chair at Harvard, packed up his lab and his office, and moved everything to Marblehead. Through all of it he was silent, carrying his whole life—twenty years of notebooks stuffed with data, framed awards, press clippings, citations, a letter from Albert Einstein—in cardboard boxes, making lists of where they were going—attic, basement, office—as though to organize the confusion. Greer herself was still trying to grasp what had happened. He had forged his data. There was no Mags. Bruce had exposed him. But where had she been through all this? What was she doing married to a man who cared so little for science? Who cared so little for her that he had, she now realized, years earlier appropriated her equation for himself?
Greer knew she had to leave him. She just didn’t know how.
“I don’t expect you to stay with me,” Thomas said one night.
Greer wanted to laugh—after years of her trying to meet his expectations, he expected nothing.
“I’m not leaving you because of the scandal,” she said. “You know why I’m leaving.” Her anger was too large to express.
“I know,” he said.
He was sitting on the porch, an old Wisconsin notebook in his lap. He seemed strangely calm, as though nothing had happened, as though he owed no apologies.
“How come you never mentioned pollination by deceit?” she asked. “Those intro lectures. Strangler figs. Malay rafflesia. Wormwood. Why not include something about ghost flowers or sun orchids? Flowers that pretend to be something they’re not. The mimics. So they can lure the bees.”
“Lily, you’ve a right to be disappointed.”
“I’ve a right to be fucking furious.”
“It had nothing to do with you.”
“That, Thomas, is the worst part.”
Deciding to leave was one thing, arriving somewhere new was another. Greer wrote letters to other universities, inquiring about research positions; she applied for several grants. And then, while Greer was still trying to figure out where she wanted to be, Thomas had a heart attack. He died in the ambulance on the way to the hospital.
She hadn’t asked him about the dissertation, but it was clear now he’d taken her equation. What she still couldn’t understand, though, was why on earth she’d let him. For months this haunted her. While she packed up his things, arranged the funeral, and waded through the paperwork of insurance, she kept going back to that night in Madison when he returned from his conference and pulled out the champagne, wondering why she hadn’t said to him:You stole from me.
But finally, after all these months on the island, after the confusion and exhaustion of her grief had settled, Greer now understood why she hadn’t. She’d turned away from his betrayal to keep alive the idea of the man with whom she’d fallen in love, clinging to the illusion of him, of their shared past.
Love, Greer thought, or the memory of love, was single-minded in its will to survive, the fittest of all emotions.
Greer wasn’t sure how far she’d gone along the path. She was tired, the day’s effort lodged in her limbs. She wandered down to where the grass met the rocks, and stretched herself out. A cool breeze swept in from the ocean and she could see the sliver of an opening in the cliff below. So many cracks in this island, she thought, as though the whole place had once been carelessly dropped from a tremendous height.
Her eyes felt dry and heavy, tugging closed. Before her on the dark ground it seemed a miniature crab was moving toward her, its legs jointed and fast. It inched closer, glossy and black in the light of the moon, a flash of red beneath its belly.
“There you are,” she mumbled as she felt herself drifting off to sleep.
23
On the rim of the Rano Raraku crater, Max tells Elsa about the war. News of the archduke’s assassination and the Austro-Hungarian declaration of war reached him in China and for months his Tsingtao fleet has been trying to make its way back to Germany. Pagan, Ponape, Eniwetok, Majuro, Samoa, Tahiti, Christmas Island—they have already zigzagged through eight thousand miles of ocean. “Eight ships, steaming beneath a constant cloud of black smoke, wholly undetected by the Allied patrols,” says Max, looking down into the crater at the scores of half-carved stone faces. At Fanning Island they blasted the cable station. On Bora Bora, they claimed to be French, flying French flags and painting over the ships’ names. Max details each anchorage, each brush with danger. After being so long in the company of only his officers, he seems elated to speak freely, to express some small astonishment, and perhaps fear, at finding himself in the middle of a war sweeping all of Europe. He is nothing like the man Elsa remembers from Strasbourg, the man who sat on that bench with such composure while she talked about Alice.
“But you, Elsa, you have been here how long? This island. It must be strange for you.”
“Strange, yes . . .“For two years, her life has consisted only of this island—Alice and Edward, Te Haha and Biscuit Tin, the mysterious script, the language. For two years, she has been immersed in novelty, riding a steady current of the unfamiliar. And now looking at Max feels out of place.
“Elsa, are you unwell?”
“I’ll be all right. I—I never expected to see you again.”
“You are not . . .unhappy with it?”
“Simply adjusting.”
“But you have thought of me?”
“Of course.” But she has not thought of him as she had expected she would. And an awareness comes to her that she has supplanted him, and not with Edward, but with her work. As if her research into the island’s past has somehow removed her from her own past. As if the past were simply a quality to which she was bound, a suitcase she was obligated to carry, but which could be filled with anything. Her own disappointments swapped for the demise of a civilization.
“You are even lovelier.”
“I think you’ve been looking at your officers too long.”
“Is that . . . yes, I think it is. The hint of a smile?”
“Max.” Something in her flutters open, and Elsa reaches out to gently touch his hand. How very odd that she can see herself, three years earlier, in Strasbourg, seated beside him on that garden bench, shielded by hedges and bushes, in that small patch of the world they made their own. Max in a brown day suit, smoking his pipe, explaining to her the various flower species in the garden, their natural habitats, noting how the beaks of the hummingbirds fit perfectly within the long petals of the fuchsias.
A cold breeze chills her face. “It’s getting late,” she says, standing.
“Elsa.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Come tomorrow. Come to the harbor where we are anchored. Please. We will talk some more. You will tell me all about your tablets and statues. And, if you like, about your husband.”
She climbs onto her pony. As Max hands her the lantern, she is struck by an impossible notion. “You’re not here . . . because ofme ?”
“I knew you were here.”
“But . . .” She doesn’t know what she means.
&nbs
p; “We came from China across the entire Pacific, stopping at a half-dozen islands along the way. We needed to gather our forces. And you were on an island. In the South Pacific. You were on this one,Liebling . I could not very well decide to coal at Juan Fernández instead.”
“I can’t believe I’m looking at you.Here. ”
“You need rest, Elsa. It’s late. But come tomorrow.” He glances over his shoulder, down the darkening slope, and whistles sharply. A heavy cantering tears through the silence and an officer on horseback appears, halting in a salute. Once again, sternness hardens Max’s face. Like magnets, his shiny black boots draw together. His hand cuts a salute.
“Elsa.” He turns to her and clasps her arms. “You realize, of course . . . you must say nothing about the war, to anyone.” He lowers his voice. “Anyone.”
She knows, above all, he means she isn’t to tell Edward. “Nicht,” she says, and rides off back to camp behind the silent officer.
The next morning, she tells Edward the squadron has requested her help.
“They’re certainly not shy about making their needs clear.” Edward is steeping a cup of tea, raising and plunging the silver globe. They have depleted most of their tea supply, and now brew with only a pinch of leaves, trying to drain every last bit of flavor.
“They want to purchase livestock,” says Elsa. “It’s best I talk to the islanders. So there’s no confusion over payment.”
“Yes. Better to assist them. Still no sign of newspapers?”
“I’ll try again today.”
“For all the help they’re asking, you would expect they would offer something in return.”
“You would expect.”
“It occurred to me,” Edward begins, sliding the cup of tea across the table to Elsa. “Their interest in the tablets”—he lifts the pot from the meager fire and pours the steaming water into another cup—“was unusually extreme.” He plunges the globe in, stirring contemplatively. “It might not be prudent to show the Germans your work on the translations.”
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