Awash in Talent

by Jessica Knauss

  When we worked on the shaker boxes, Carlos usually chose me as his partner because we had the same rhythm. Back and forth, side to side, a mating dance to discover fossils. He was the only one who ever used the global phone, always at odd hours to call the States and check on his wife and their new baby. So imagine my surprise when he came running from the truck to where I was kneeling on the earth, sorting pebbles that might be fossils onto a crusty blanket, to tell me I had a phone call.

  “It’s your mom,” he said breathlessly as we walked back together. His eyes shone.

  I spat out some dirt and spoke into the receiver. “What is it?”

  Tinny, tiny, the voice came back to me. “Emily, we’re coming to see you.”

  “Who’s doing what?”

  “Your sister wouldn’t let it go. Beth got a medical clearance and we’re all coming to see you.”

  It had to be the connection. “Mom, it sounds like you’re saying you’re coming to see me.”

  “We are. We have tickets for next week.”

  None of this was possible or likely or desirable, but I played along. “Okay. But I can’t meet you at the airport.”

  “Oh, we know you can’t leave the site.” The call suddenly cut off, apparently sympathizing with my discomfort.

  I worked the next few days hunched over, looking but not seeing. One morning, Carlos noisily laid claim to what looked to be an intact hominid femur, so everyone moved to that site. The truck trundled up behind me as I used a soft toothbrush on the surface of the femur. Thoughts of Carlos still had a way of filling my ears and my heart. I was thinking about the raspy tiredness in his voice when he’d told me, “Emily, you’re the only one I can trust with this level of detail. Make sure none of the other students interfere.” My name in his mouth was like a melody, so I barely heard the commotion.

  Finally, Carlos’s real voice startled me from my reverie.

  “What are you doing? Are you crazy? We have an intact hominid femur in this area and you’re driving a truck through it!”

  I looked up in time to see my father hopping out of the offending vehicle. “You have a what, now?”

  My muscles protested, but I stood up and shaded my eyes in his direction. “An intact hominid femur. Femurs can tell us so much about where any hominid is in the evolution of upright walking.”

  “You mean we didn’t just stand up one day, and that was it? I guess I never thought about it before,” said the man who had somehow engendered me.

  “Oh my God, Dad,” I said, absently returning the hug and kiss my mother, so much shorter in Africa, was earnestly delivering to me. A shapeless blob was making its way out the door of the truck in clearly defined stages—clinging to the door, gingerly stepping onto the lip under the door, and putting one cotton-clad foot at a time on the sediment-laden soil, all while clutching a surgical mask ever closer to her mouth and nostrils.

  It was Beth. She was in some kind of hazmat suit made of puffy, crinkly, white material, probably the cost of her unprecedented desire to travel. My mother went to help her and she tried to wave at me and say, “Hi!”

  Carlos was at my side, wringing his hands. “I’m sorry, sir, but you’ll have to get that truck out of here. This is a very delicate work site.”

  “This is Carlos, Dad,” I said. “You really have to do what he says.”

  “Of course, I wouldn’t want to ruin any scientific discoveries,” he said, then went to talk with the driver.

  Maddeningly, they didn’t leave with the truck. Their presence was totally extraneous to the long, hot afternoons with the man of my heart. I set my relatives up with folding chairs under the tent where we kept the global phone and other electronic equipment and went back to work, crouching next to Carlos. He narrated, with unbelievable panache, every move he made and every theory he had about the story behind the femur. I would have chosen that moment to last for all time, no questions asked.

  But there was a persistent, rough sound invading our enchanted space. Carlos kept looking over his shoulder, until he said, “Emily, look at your sister.”

  Painstakingly, I turned my head in the direction of the tent. Actors portraying my parents stood in complete consternation, looking down at an actress in the role of my sister, who wriggled and squirmed in the whirling dirt, maybe trying to escape the retching, hacking cough that propelled itself out of her mouth unbidden.

  “I knew it! It’s the dust. It’s full of allergens. I knew it!” My mother stooped in an attempt to hold Beth down.

  I stood up, my body already resistant to the change in position. I knocked down a couple of the little orange flags we were using to mark fossil sites and had to prop them back up. By the time I made it to the tent, the coughing had become a prolonged, moaning scream and I heard my dad say something on the global phone about a medevac helicopter to Addis Ababa.

  “No!” I shouted, knocking the receiver out of his hand. I lifted my mother’s hands off Beth and threw her over my shoulder in what I thought must be a fireman’s carry and jogged in the direction where I knew our truck would be, a half mile away. The driver took us to the site every morning from our camp and back again in the evening. We all walked the half mile each way in order to lessen the risk of disturbing the fossils. This time, my sister’s screaming filled my ear instead of the gentle hum of Carlos’s voice talking about the day’s plan with Professor Marsden.

  I hoisted Beth into the passenger side of the cab, and my parents and the driver came running up behind me. “Take her to the nearest medical facility,” I said to the driver, intending to turn back to the site, but a great clamp that turned out to be my mother’s hand stopped me from speeding off. So I climbed in, too, and the four of us sat crammed so close together that we were able to squeeze the coughing out of Beth long before the driver gestured toward what looked like a simple mud hut. The lack of movement had not stifled Beth’s her high-pitched squeal, however.

  My mother opened her eyes wide at the hut, as if by doing so she could convert it into a steel and glass grant-funded research hospital in San Francisco or Boston.

  “They’ll take very good care of her here,” said the driver.

  “I trust him,” I said as earnestly as I could, even though I wasn’t sure he was the same driver who brought us to and fro every day.

  “Anything’s fine, really,” said Beth between gasps. “Just let me out of here.”

  My dad opened the door from the inside and we all decompressed out of it. My dad and mom supported Beth’s weight between them as they walked to the uninviting corrugated metal door. An attendant in a lab coat answered the door and whisked us all inside. With the help of several more people, he absconded with Beth behind another unimpressive door. The speed with which Beth had disappeared into medical care impressed me and I tried to say reassuring things to that effect, but my parents insisted on pacing the waiting room, inspecting the plastic chairs and inscrutable pictures on the walls for something to do.

  I was the only one sitting calmly—boredly, in truth—so when the doctor came from beyond the other door, she came to me and my parents gathered around us. The doctor was breathtaking: six and a half feet tall, with large, lucid eyes and closely cropped hair. Her lab coat was immaculate, so I guessed that she had changed it before coming to see us, because what she presented to us in a clear plastic bag was anything but clean.

  Through the red gore and the grey-green foamy substance that seemed to writhe all over it, I could still see that it had, long ago, been the pop-top tab of an aluminum cola can. I held my hand over my nose and mouth and couldn’t keep back a few retching convulsions.

  “We removed this from your daughter’s small intestine,” the doctor said with an intent gaze at my mother.

  “Is this some kind of joke?” demanded my mother.

  “Is Beth all right?” asked my father.

  “She appears to be fine,” the doctor said calmly, setting the bag on the table next to my chair. I concentrated on her face as she continue
d, “She was awake during the extraction.”

  My mother lunged toward the doctor, and her fists didn’t land on their mark only because my father held her arms. “What? You didn’t sedate her?”

  “She refused, madam. She wanted to be aware of what was happening. We were able to make a very precise incision with her guidance. She told us she’d accidentally swallowed the tab while attempting to open an RC Cola can with her teeth.”

  “What? Why?” shrieked my mother.

  “She said something about impressing her sister.”

  For some reason, everyone looked at me. “When did this happen?” demanded my mother.

  “How should I know? It’s not like she was worth paying attention to until the doctor told us she stayed awake and guided the scalpels,” I said in an even tone, in an attempt to get my mother to calm down.

  “It was just before I came down with all the allergies.” A thin but steady voice came from the doorway. I gazed at my sister, rapt. She was holding on to the doorway so hard, I was sure clumps of it were going to come off in her hand. Her hospital gown hung limply open on her frame, revealing a trickle of blood oozing from under the surgical bandage and over her white briefs. I was vaguely aware of my father covering his eyes from the sight.

  “Since you weren’t paying attention to me even halfway across the world, Emily, I decided I didn’t need your attention any more. And I decided not to have allergies anymore. It was time for the aluminum to come out.” I noticed her bare, pink feet lose their grip on the rough floor as two nurses came up behind her and one inserted the contents of a syringe into her naked arm.

  He apologized to all of us in general. “She needs to rest. We couldn’t keep her in the bed.”

  We all followed the nurses back to the recovery room, where they gingerly laid my fascinating sister in the bed. I had no memory of anyone trying to open a can with their teeth, much less a member of my own family, and I wondered how the tab had managed to stay so recognizable after all those years in a corrosive environment. While Beth slept off the drugs, the doctor kindly brought chairs from the waiting room so we could all sit. She said she’d seen many more puzzling objects caught in people’s digestive tracts in the few years she’d been a doctor.

  We all just stared at my sister, at her rhythmically falling and rising chest, at the little mounds of her pupils darting under her eyelids. Beth looked a lot like me, I noticed: the straight brown hair, arranged in a way that she probably meant to look like mine; the unruly eyebrows; the long, ramrod-straight eyelashes. I’d introduce her to an eyelash curler when this was all over. I felt strangely united with my parents while the three of us directed all of our energy toward Beth’s wellbeing.

  Her lips twitched. I laid my hand on her wrist. Her eyes snapped open, as clear as they’d been before she came down with all the allergies.

  “How do you feel?” I asked.

  “Better than I have in years.” She sounded a little crusty, so I went to look for someone who could bring water.

  When I came back to Beth’s side, my mother was in the process of doubting my sister’s statement.

  Beth flipped the blankets off. “I feel fine. I don’t need pain relievers or bed rest. I only need to help Emily find fossils to impress that graduate student.”

  My heart fluttered at the mention of Carlos. “That’s not why I do it,” I muttered, then nodded. “But, yes, if you really feel all that good, you can come into the pits with me and learn how not to disturb the evidence.”

  She smiled widely: I guess she still wanted my attention after all. She sat up, utterly unimpeded, and made to throw her leg over the side of the bed, but my mother held her down and screamed, “Doctor, doctor!”

  The doctor came back into the room and smiled at Beth. “Feeling better?” Her voice was like honey. “Let’s take a look.”

  She parted the flimsy hospital gown and gingerly lifted the surgical bandage. I wanted to look away, but I was too entranced. A pool of blood sloshed in the hollow of my sister’s stomach to the rhythm of her breathing. The doctor swabbed it up with a towel to reveal Beth’s belly button, accompanied only by healthy skin and a barely visible surgical thread that snaked in and out of her flesh. There was no sign of the incision, as if it had never been there at all.

  “See?” Beth said. “What did I tell you? I can get up now.”

  “You certainly can,” the doctor said, so improbably that my mother felt the need to intervene physically again, clapping Beth’s arms back onto the bed’s surface.

  “What’s going on here?” she demanded.

  My father was trying to appear reasonable, but he was standing awfully close to the doctor, staring hard into her eyes.

  “The first sign was when she was able to guide the incision while it was happening,” the doctor explained with admirable calm. “But now there’s no doubt that your daughter is one of a very special class of people. There are only maybe one hundred of them in the world at any one time.”

  I helped my sister get dressed in the clothes she’d arrived in—not that she needed any help—while the doctor explained that, because this was the cradle of humanity, she’d seen more than her fair share of cases. “These special people share the gift of healing that your daughter has illustrated. In fact, we call them Other-Talented Healers, because in addition, they possess telekinesis, or pyrokinesis, or psychic powers. Your daughter’s other Talent will probably manifest over time, now that we’ve extracted the aluminum from her system. We think aluminum is her kryptonite, the elemental substance that weakens her and takes her Talents away, but she should probably be tested to be sure. The only certainty is that she is physically fine.”

  Beth came up close to my mother and said, “See? You really should trust my judgment.”

  “That’s not a bad idea,” the doctor said.

  While we waited for the truck that would take us back to the hotel my parents had booked, the doctor placed a piece of paper with the contact information of the people she knew who were like Beth into my mother’s shaking hand. The doctor stood with us and patted my mother’s shoulder. I was free to give, for the first time ever, my undivided attention to Beth while I held on to the sack with her former aluminum burden inside.

  My parents arranged for a return home as soon as possible. During the three days before the next available flight from Addis Ababa, I was busy seeing what it was like to have a sister, and trying to balance that with my unflagging interest in Carlos. Beth, now outfitted in a normal t-shirt, shorts, and sun hat, came out to the site every day with me. I was unsure whether it was appropriate to hold her hand as we walked and how much to tell her about my assured future with Carlos.

  As promised, I showed her how not to destroy the evidence, and she learned quickly. We had plenty of time when we could have worked side by side in silence, but there was a new bridge building between us, and the girders were words. Most memorably, she said, “It’s really great that you’re digging up all this stuff now. You can carry the memory of these discoveries into whatever happens next.”

  “What happens next?” I asked rather too shrilly. I glanced at Carlos, two pits over.

  Beth wiped her arm across her beading forehead, creating a brown smear. “Well, no one really knows what happens after we die,” she said lightly, continuing to use a sharp dental instrument to define the outline of what might have been an ancient fingertip. “Or whether the end of the world will be a special case. I mean, when everybody dies all at once, will the souls have to wait in line? The traffic!”

  “When everybody dies all at once?” I insisted.

  “Well, maybe not all at once,” she said. “But you know, with climate change, the ocean levels will rise higher than ever in the next few years. With everybody competing for land and food, there’s bound to be a mass die-off.”

  I had learned about such extinctions, of course, but they had never seemed so alarming before. I looked down at the fossils, but mostly at the dirt in which they were en
cased. If all this was gone in a few years, what would I have to show for myself? I looked at Carlos again, wondering if our souls would be caught waiting together on the off ramp to the next place. Would Carlos’s soul have that crazy blond hair?

  “So you blithely accept the end of the world as we know it?” I asked.

  “Well, sure. What can we do about it?”

  I wondered whether my sister had been this interesting all along.

  The last day before my family left, Beth and I sat in the dust around the pit where Carlos was gently prodding at his prized femur. The sun was digging into my skin and causing so much sweat to well up, it was as if I’d been in the shower, but much less pleasant. It didn’t matter. All I really wanted were Carlos’s arms around me and his hot breath in my ear.

  For some reason, that thought made me look at my sister. Her stare was so icy, I knew I would never need to pay for air conditioning again. She nodded toward Carlos, and I saw that the bone he had been so precisely extracting from the ancient layers of silt and dust had suddenly jumped into his cupped hand. He hadn’t even had time to put down his scalpel, and the whole valley seemed to echo with the clink it made against the ancient bone.

  Carlos remained frozen, his jaw sinking lower and lower toward the ground. “What happened?” I cried. The only reply I got was a pile of gauze gliding, ghostlike, toward Carlos as if it knew it was needed for the safe transport and cataloging of the precious bone.

  “Beth?” I said.

  She looked back at me, too serious, so we stood up and walked toward the communications tent where she had so recently collapsed.

  “Are you ready to go home?” I said, parentally, because I couldn’t bear to ask the real question: whether she had had anything to do with the objects’ movement. I didn’t know what the telekinesis policy was in Ethiopia, but back in the States, people with that kind of Talent were closely monitored and often forced to live in communes that a lot of civil rights groups compared to concentration camps.