by Nino Cipri
The Kansas landscape stretched flat in all directions, disrupted by hay bales and the odd muddy creek or copse of trees. It was a little prettier once he got closer to the park, but Damian had yet to spot any hills, flint or otherwise. He found the turnoff after several minutes of searching, doubling back, and prayer, and followed the long dirt track to a lean-to in the middle of a field. A half-dozen cars were parked in the flattened grass, several sporting Emporia State stickers. Still, Damian wasn’t certain he’d found what he was looking for until he saw Ray’s truck. The sight of the boxy blue Toyota hit him like a fist to the solar plexus, as if his nostalgia had mass and velocity, shooting out in a soft arc before coming around like a boomerang and knocking him on his ass. How many nights had he passed in that truck? How many days had he spent riding in its cab, sandwiched between his best friend and the man he was dizzily, annoyingly in love with?
***
Ray was still out in the field, so Damian practiced his charm on Ray’s unsuspecting undergrads. About half of them actually recognized him, and the rest were happy to be distracted from data entry with the story of how he had met Ray. He’d been practicing it, figuring he would be telling it on camera in the near future.
“I got my names mixed up. There’s a paleontologist in Omaha with the same name but different spelling, and I thought I was calling him at first. Ray was less than a year into his tenure, and the department secretary literally asked me if I wouldn’t rather talk to one of the senior professors.”
“Doctor Pratt is still really salty about that,” one of the students said, grinning.
“Yeah, you can’t ask him to be on the same committee as Ray anymore. He gets really bitchy about it,” another added.
Damian grinned. “Not surprised. He called me on the dig and actually told me that if I was smart, I’d ask him to take over.” He’d actually been in Ray’s truck, and put Pratt on speaker phone so that Ray could listen to him talk his entitled shit in person. Right up until he dropped some barely veiled racist bullshit about Ray’s standoffishness and unreliability, then launched into a rant about how the department was being diminished by “minority hires” like Ray, who was Lakota. Damian hung up on Pratt and used the fucker’s university email to sign up for newsletters from several pornography and fetish sites.
“Anyway,” he said, “I had to email Doctor Walker six more times and then pester the department secretary before he’d agree to a Skype meeting. I’m pretty sure he only agreed so he could tell me to my face to fuck off,” Damian finished, to a generous round of laughter. Of course, that’s when Ray walked up. Damian couldn’t have planned it better.
“What the hell are you doing here?” Ray said, which killed the laughter as sharply as if it had been guillotined.
Ray spoke in a flat Midwest accent that, for some reason, always made Damian think of hollow logs rolling down a hill. It was unmistakable and weirdly attractive.
“I was hoping to talk to you,” Damian answered. He put his hands into his pockets, but that felt too confrontational. He took them back out, but that felt awkward. Ray had grown his hair out and wore it tied back in a messy bun, wavy tendrils escaping in the wind. Damian instinctively wanted to tuck them back behind Ray’s ears.
“Hell of a drive from New York City, just for a conversation,” Ray said. “Why didn’t you call?”
“You changed your number.”
Ray rolled his eyes. “Min still has my number. You could have gotten it from her.”
He hadn’t even thought of that. Why were Min and Ray still talking to each other and not to him? He was the connection between them, the common denominator. He’d assumed that they’d all lost touch at the same time, after he’d announced his book deal and they’d looked at him with betrayal instead of excitement. “I’ve got a proposition for you,” he said to Ray. “And I figured you’d be less likely to turn me down in person.”
Ray huffed—not quite a scoff, but too annoyed to be a laugh. “Good to know you’re still a manipulative shit.”
There was a soft, emphatic “Dang” from one of the students. Ray blushed and sent a withering glare at the group.
“I guess I deserve that,” Damian said quietly. He absolutely deserved that. Even now, he was playing to their audience, calculating how much hurt to allow into his voice and vigorously hating himself for it. He wanted to be a good person, but he wanted to do good work more. This documentary was good—ergo: all was fair.
“Come on, you’ve distracted them enough,” Ray said. “Step into my office.”
His office was, of course, his truck, and if the sight of it had been a punch to the gut, actually stepped into it was like getting reverse-suplexed into the past. Same threadbare fabric on the seats. Same clatter of coffee cups rolling around the passenger footwell. Same dusty dashboard, with the word BUTTS etched into the leather near the passenger window—a gift from one of Ray’s nephews. Ray had attempted to turn it into the word BURTS, supposedly in honor of Reynolds and Kwouk, but with meager success.
It was horrible. Damian only liked the past when it was a minimum of six hundred years old.
“The good old Buttsmobile,” he said.
“It’s the Burtsmobile, damn it,” Ray muttered. “What’s your proposition?”
“The Smithsonian wants to make a documentary about ossicarminis”.
“Adapt your book, you mean?”
“Not just the book,” Damian said. “They optioned it as an actual documentary about ossicarminis, finding and identifying them, the whole thing with NEOCO.” He wasn’t going to go into the Space Weasels. He could really only have one crisis of conscience at a time.
“And what happened after? Our falling-out? Or only the part of the story that makes you look good?” Ray asked. He’d always been blunt. Damian used to like that about him.
“Is that what you call it?” Damian asked, honestly interested. “A falling-out?”.
Ray shrugged. “That’s what other people call it when they’re trying to ask me what happened.”
“Falling-out,” Damian said again, testing the words. Like it was natural, something to do with gravity, rather than two stubborn assholes roleplaying an unstoppable force meeting an immovable object.
“I told them I wouldn’t do it without you and Min,” Damian said. It wasn’t quite a lie; assuring Annika that Ray and Min would definitely sign onto the project was basically the same thing. “The two of you are the story. More than me. I just got lucky by falling in a cave.”
“Ossicarminis is the story,” Ray said. “I—I don’t—”
Damian waited him out, toying with the iron pendant his mother had made him in a smithing class. She said it was a fish, but it looked more like a frying pan.
“I don’t want to rehash the whole fucking thing, man,” Ray said eventually. A nice blush was spreading across his cheek. “Not what happened between us. That stays off camera and in the past.”
“I am one hundred percent okay with that,” Damian said, and knew it was a lie as soon as he said it. He had fallen into a fast, consumptive love with this nerdy asshole and his terrible khakis, his probably lethal caffeine habit, and his utter disinterest in being tactful. Their so-called falling-out hadn’t changed that. He had originally planned on avoiding Ray forever, but since talking with Amelia, he’d come around rapidly to the idea that this could be his second chance. Hence actually driving out into this godforsaken prairie infested with Elvis-themed restaurants. They’d wanted the same thing, after all: to spread the word about ossicarminis, to make people understand the gravity of this discovery. They had disagreed loudly and angrily on how to do that, and Ray had dumped him.
And then he’d grown out his hair, which just seemed unfair.
“You grew out your hair,” Damian said, like a lovesick idiot.
Ray looked surprised, then ran a hand over it. “I told myself I would when I got tenure. When they couldn’t fire me for looking ‘unprofessional.’” The word dripped with sarcasm. “Not
sure if that meant too gay or too Indian. The chair never specified. Both, probably.”
“Jesus fuck,” Damian said, appalled. “Well, I hear they’re all mad as hell now.”
“They’re gonna die mad,” Ray said, grinning.
The familiarity was a physical ache; Damian thought of the feeling of taking off his binder after a day of wear, stretching his shoulders back after hunching them for hours. It was unfair, it was exquisite, and it felt like pressing hard on a bruise that he’d successfully ignored for the past year and a half.
“So?” he asked. “Documentary?
Ray stared him down, his expression shifting to something a little wearier. “Of course I’ll do it.” Damian had enough time to feel profoundly, shockingly grateful, before Ray held up a finger and said, “If...”
Damian already knew what he was going to say, but it still made his gut roil to hear it.
“If we rebury the bones.”
Part Two: Min
I’m Min-ji Hong. I’m a PhD candidate in linguistics at the University of Chicago. Damian Flores is one of my oldest friends, which is presumably why I got dragged into this instead of, like, an established scholar? He probably knew I wouldn’t try to steal the research out from under him.
How did I meet Damian? We went to summer camp together for gender non-conforming teens. We were some of the only non-white kids there, and we were both hyperactive science nerds. I was in Rivera Cabin, he was in Feinberg. We teamed up for some epic pranks on the bitches in Jenner after they called our scholarship cabins ghetto. We kept each other going through high school and college, but we lost touch a little once I started my PhD, and he went to work as a full-time activist.
My research is about writing systems. I focus on logographic systems, which...wait. It’s going to take me a second translate this out of academic bullshit jargon. I’ve been ass-deep in dissertation revisions for weeks. So. Logographic writing systems use written characters to represent words, phrases, or ideas, as opposed to sounds. Characters in Latin alphabets refer to consonants and vowels, whereas Japanese kanji refer to concepts, for example. There are almost always some phonograms or phonetic complements, at least in complete writing systems, which, let’s be clear, the ossicarmin script is not. Complete writing systems can be used to visually represent, in full, verbal communication. We only have the small sample size from this one group, but in my opinion—
Let me rephrase that, since I’m ABD and I’ve been waiting to claim this.
In my expert opinion, ossicarminis didn’t have a complete writing system. What they had is similar to what we see in some of the earlier Neolithic writing systems: pictograms on the edge of abstraction, carved into a set of bones. There’s no way of translating it. There’s no Rosetta Stone, which is a real tragedy. Still, calling the texts “oracle bones” is...well, it sounds more badass than “textual artifacts,” but it’s a total misnomer. They could be, like, receipts. The fact that they were found in a burial site doesn’t necessarily mean they’re the prehistoric weasel Bible. I have my own theories on what they are, but I’m saving those for my book.
Before all this crap happened, I mostly focused on Anatolian protowriting systems. Now it’s just the ossicarmin scripts. What else are you going to do when an entirely new writing system that was created by giant weasels or whatever is literally handed to you? Publish or perish, motherfucker. I’ve got this shit locked.
Huh? I was swearing? Sorry. I’ll try harder.
***
She’d expected a nameless driver, but it was Ray waiting for her at baggage claim in San Francisco, tall and smiling and dressed in his signature ugly professor clothes. Min broke into a pleased smile, forgetting the cramped flight, the overwhelming feeling of being forced into close quarters with humanity after weeks of marinating in her own solitude.
“Mom says hi,” Min said after they hugged. “And to tell you not to sleep with Damian.”
“Sure, okay, tell her hi back, and to please never talk about my sex life again.”
“No promises,” Min replied. Mom had put it a little bit more nicely than that—she’d couched it in terms of unfinished business and looking for love in all the wrong places—but it was easy to make Ray blush. Min hadn’t had the chance to do it in a while.
Ray held his hand out for her luggage, one of those old-fashioned gestures that gave her a little thrill of gender affirmation. Ray had always done chivalrous crap like that, which Min not-so-secretly loved because she was so rarely on the receiving end of it, a little too tall and sharp-featured to pass as cis.
She kept hold of her carry-on, though, and the little wooden box containing the oracle bones. The edges of it dug into her ribs, a sharp reminder of all that she hadn’t told Ray.
“I probably would have backed out if you hadn’t come,” Ray said as they walked out into the muted California sunlight, “but I am really thankful you’re here. You’re the only one who knows who to keep Damian in line.”
“It’s practice,” Min said. “I’ve been building up a tolerance for his brand of bullshit since I was fourteen.”
It wasn’t that she didn’t love Damian—she did. She loved him as surely and deeply as she loved the Tartaria tablets and Harry Potter fanfiction, with an understanding that for all their wonders, they tended to inspire endless drama.
***
Annika Wagner-Smith had suggested that they meet in a Chinese buffet called Sun King. She was, as Damian had said, Miss Frizzle as a Gender Studies/Media professor. Her hair went up, her glasses were round and severe, and she seemed to be aggressively fond of both tweed and purple accessories. She apparently hadn’t waited for them to arrive before grabbing a plate and filling it with a half-demolished mountain of imitation crab. Had she only eaten crab?
Annika stood up when Min and Ray approached, dislodging a couple of crab sticks that flopped down onto the table cloth. She was surrounded by an entourage of crew members, some of whom Min recognized from the Chicago shoots. She waved cautiously to Kamal, the hot assistant director, and he waved back.
“Welcome, Ms. Hong, Mr. Walker,” Annika said. She didn’t seem to be speaking loudly, but her voice still carried across the room, as if she were bending the frequency of her voice to reach them. “We’re still waiting on Damian, but please grab some plates.”
Min side-eyed the buffet tables and the people being served. Mostly white families in tourist gear; she adjusted her expectations accordingly. She picked carefully through the food, selecting the least offensive-looking things, and grabbed Ray’s arm when he looked thoughtfully at the salad bar.
“E. coli,” she said. “Trust me, it’s not worth it.”
“You remember that I live in the middle of nowhere, right?” he said. “Last winter, the chair of the department decided to have our holiday party at Golden Corral.”
She shuddered. “We’re getting real food while we’re here, right?” she asked. “I’m not coming out to San Francisco and not eating my weight in seafood.”
“Can’t you get fish in Chicago?”
Min’s heart ached for Ray, so sad, so uncultured. “We’re definitely getting brunch tomorrow.”
Damian walked in right as they’d sat down to eat, and Annika repeated her strangely regal welcome. He waved off the offer of food, mentioning a late lunch, and satisfied himself with some green tea instead. He and Ray nodded politely to each other, sat on opposite sides of the table, and spent the rest of dinner furtively staring at each other. Min regretted relaying her mother’s urge of abstinence to Ray; she hadn’t realized how damn awkward things were between them already.
She ended up talking to Kamal, who had grown up on the South Side; they talked shit about the terrified suburban white students who walked in packs through Hyde Park until they realized that it wasn’t actually the war zone everyone north of Roosevelt seemed to believe. She surreptitiously watched Annika go to the buffet no less than five more times, each time bringing back a plate piled high with only one kind o
f food: chicken wings, spring rolls, steamed vegetables, crab rangoon, pork dumplings. Each time, she steadily and single-mindedly worked her way through the plate until it was clear.
“I know, it’s hard to look away,” Kamal said.
“I don’t know if I’m impressed or terrified.”
Kamal sipped his Tsingtao. “Annika has that effect on people. I’m like, sixty percent sure it’s on purpose?”
Annika went back to the buffet one last time, but returned only with a small plate of pudding. She set it down among the debris of her meal and the drift of wadded-up napkins, then clinked her spoon against her pudding bowl until everyone fell silent.
“Thank you all for coming. I am so happy to be here. So happy. So, so incredibly happy.” She gazed around the table, making forcible eye contact with every person there. “I want to extend a special welcome to our three experts: Mister Damian Flores, and Doctors Hong and Walker.”
Min momentarily felt the need to correct her—a long habit, since she’d been working on her PhD for six and a half goddamn years—but decided to let it pass. Fuck it.
“Kamal will be sending out the shooting schedule tonight. We’re going to be based in San Francisco this week with segments at the San Francisco Zoo, a wildlife rehabilitation center, and the natural history museum. Next week, we’ll be in Nebraska, with reenactments at the site.”
“What’s this about a zoo?” Min asked Kamal.
He nodded. “We’re going to get one or two of you into an otter habitat while someone else visits the wolverines.”
Min turned to him with a steely look in her eye. She laid her hand firmly on his arm, and he glanced down at it curiously.
“I call dibs,” she said solemnly, pressing her nails lightly against his skin. “The otters are mine.”