by Nino Cipri
He smiled, obviously terrified. “That’s cool. I’ll let Annika know.”
***
Did you not hear me when I introduced myself? I’m a linguist. I study writing systems. I don’t give a fuck who would win in a fight. Not unless some ossicarminis decided to make an epic poem out of it.
Which...huh. Maybe that’s what specimen 6 is.
***
They took Damian to the otter exhibit as well. She’d hoped she’d be able to go by herself, but going with Damian was the next best thing. She loved Ray, she did, but Ray was not susceptible to cuteness the way that she and Damian were. He would have stood there and sighed, and looked sad that the animals were in a zoo. And sure, yeah, zoos were evil, but Min got to hold a baby sea otter.
His name was Tufts. He legit sounded like a dog’s squeaky toy. He was fuzzy.
“Ugh, his little hands.” Min was broken.
“His flesh-tearing little teeth,” Damian cooed.
“Hey, we were hoping to get some, like, science out of you guys?” Kamal said.
“Can’t science,” Damian said. “Too fuzzy.”
Tufts the orphaned otter sneezed, and Min burst into tears.
“Okay, maybe we’ll talk to some of the zookeepers,” Kamal sighed.
“I am so thankful for testosterone,” Damian said. “Otherwise I would be crying too.”
“I know I said I’d only do this for the money,” Min said, wiping her eyes on her shirt. “But if you had told me I’d be able to feed a baby otter fish giblets, I would have done it for free.”
Damian whispered, “Oh my god. He pooped on me, and I don’t even care. It smells disgusting, but I still want to cuddle him.”
They did manage to do a half-serious interview later in the day, though they had to find Damian a different shirt first, free of otter feces.
“There’s a lot that fossil records leave out,” Damian said. “We have enough information to form theories but never prove them. We can’t know, for instance, how ossicarminis took care of its young. Or its elderly. We know that they lived near freshwater, but we don’t know the size of their bands.”
“Groups of otters are called romps, actually,” Min said, interrupting. She’d looked it up before coming here.
Damian gave her a look—she really hoped that glare made it onto the final reel. “We’re still debating whether they’re more closely related to otters or wolverines.”
“Biologists like Ray are still debating that.” Min shifted back in her seat. “We’re also trying to answer other questions. What did ossicarminis think about? What did they fear? When they walked out into the night and looked up at the stars, what did they see?” Min was literally quoting from her dissertation at this point, but it sounded good, so she kept going. “What did the universe look like from their point of view?”
“We have so many questions,” Damian said. “And so few answers. But that’s life, isn’t it? We let inertia carry us into a future with a—a shady flashlight that’s going dim. We can barely understand where we’ve come from, and where our choices have led us, but we keep groping forward, trying to find a way out of the mess we’ve made.”
There was a long moment of silence, before Min cleared her throat and said delicately, “You got a little off track there.”
Damian was staring at a spot on the floor. “Yeah, I did,” he said. Min shot Kamal a look and said, “Could you get us some water? Water seems like a good idea right now.”
Kamal nodded at one of the other crew members, who scurried off. Min leaned forward. “Okay, Damian—”
He held up a hand. “I know, this is really shitty timing.”
“It is, yep.”
“But holy shit, it’s like I stopped and realized. How deeply and seriously up my own ass I’ve been.”
They obviously weren’t going to circumvent this. She leaned back in her chair and braced herself for a tirade about his feelings for Ray, and Ray’s stubborn refusal to forgive him, and how Ray’s long hair was a personal attack on Damian’s weak, gay heart. Maybe Kamal could get one of his underlings to fetch her some booze instead. Damian looked at her searchingly. “I am so sorry,” he said.
Min stared at him. “Wait, what?”
“I wrote the book without you. Oracle Bones. I quoted from you so much—hell, there are two chapters where I’m basically paraphrasing your preliminary findings.”
“Damian!” Min said sharply. “What are you talking about?”
“Jesus, Min, I’m trying to apologize,” Damian said. “I should have made you a co-author for Oracle Bones, not just quoted you. Ray, too, obviously, but you’re my oldest friend. And it was shitty.”
“If you were actually my friend, you’d stop trying to have this conversation with me in public, when we are on camera.”
Sure, she’d been stung by the news that Damian had found a publisher for a manuscript about finding ossicarminis. After all that they’d been through together—not only facing a bunch of asswipes from the Nebraska Energy and Oil Commission, but like, all of it. All the nights the three of them had spent in drafty tents, working by hand-wound lanterns, making supply runs into Chadron, the only nearby town with a grocery store that also sold liquor. They’d been isolated out there, and every night she’d felt the clock ticking away toward the deadline that the Commission had set before they would start digging. It had been hard enough going back to Chicago, back to her studies on Anatolian scripts. She’d lasted a week before telling her advisor that she was tossing her previous work and going all in on the ossicarminis script. Nobody had understood. It had driven her to drink, the way that the world absorbed the discovery of ossicarminis like a penny sinking into a pool of Jell-O. At one point, she considered taking out a full-page ad in the Sun-Times that said “INTELLIGENT PREHISTORIC MUSTELIDS ARE MORE IMPORTANT THAN THE CUBS’ CHANCES IN THE PENNANT OR LUWIAN HIEROGLYPHS.”
And then the news that Damian was publishing a book. By himself. The book: the authoritative text about the discovery of the only non-hominid species with a written language. Min had heard the phrase publish or perish nearly every day since she matriculated, and that news slid between her ribs like a knife. Damian would publish and leave them to perish.
Leave her, rather. At least Ray had tenure, even if it was at a podunk state college in fucking Kansas.
She and Damian stared at each other for a long minute, until Kamal cleared his throat and said quietly, “You should hug.”
Min had actually managed to forget he was there. “Are you fucking recording this?” she asked.
He raised his eyebrows. “I needed something better than the two of you crying over otters.”
“I don’t fucking want to hug him,” Min said. She was somehow angrier than she’d been at the start of all this.
“You could hit him instead?” Kamal suggested. “That would also be great.”
“Fight, fight, fight,” the boom operator chanted softly.
***
Min had a weird relationship with museums. As a historical linguist, she needed archives to keep textual artifacts that would allow her to track the evolution of language, symbol, and meaning, and the interactions between the three. As someone who actually knew something about the history of museums, though, she couldn’t go into one without feeling a twinge of guilt. Canons exclusively comprised of white cis men, the centering of the colonial gaze, cultural appropriation—she could probably write an entire essay about it, and maybe she would, when the sight of her laptop stopped giving her hives. But you could say nearly all the same things about higher education, and that hadn’t stopped her from tossing herself into the shark-infested waters of academia nearly a decade ago.
Still, she felt a weird glow of pride at the actual ossicarminis exhibit at the Kimball Museum. She and Damian had been there at the opening. Ray had been invited but, as he told her later, didn’t reply; he had, in fact, used the invitation to scoop up his neighbor’s dog’s shit.
(“Ray, the invitati
on was emailed.”
“I know. I printed it out just for the occasion.”)
The room was wide and well-lit, with the two skeletons encased in glass; it reminded her a little bit of the mausoleums and crystal coffins where the bodies of Ho Chi Minh and Mao Zedong rested. Museum-goers filed past the cases where the two skeletons lay, having been expertly articulated and laid out in their original positions from the cave. The larger skeleton, with a heavy skull and long tail, curled around the smaller. The bones were flawless, with no obvious trauma, almost as if they’d both died in their sleep.
Min liked to joke that she didn’t really have a heart—grad school had chewed it up until there was nothing left but gristle. Still, the sight of the two skeletons hit her on some deep, complicated maternal level; there was something so protective about the stance, so loving. If they had, as Ray believed, been intentionally buried in that cave, it was both easy and heart-destroying to imagine a group of mourning ossicarminis arranging the adult around the child to protect it in the afterlife.
A group of schoolkids came through, tailed by a couple of exhausted chaperones. They ran up to the glass coffin and smeared greasy fingerprints all over it, shouting over each other. Min took a couple steps back, maternal moment obliterated by the sticky reality of real children. None of them even looked at the panels about the discovery or the writing. The room was utter chaos for a few minutes, until the kids got bored and bounded off to the next exhibit. They were followed by another actor in a neon-green spandex suit, playing the part of an ossicarminis.
“Okay, okay, yes,” Annika said loudly, following him with the camera. “Approach them like they are your relatives. Your ancestors. Hero-gods from another age. Someone you have never set eyes on, but still have deep reverence and love for.”
The actor laid his green-gloved hands reverently on the glass.
“Put your face on the glass,” she said, and the actor touched his forehead gently to the case. “No! No! This is not a funeral! You’re a rascal and you are blowing raspberries at the past!”
Min frowned, but the actor didn’t seem to mind the sudden change of mood. He smashed his cheeks against the glass and blew a raspberry. Min shuddered, thinking of how many various orifices the kids had probably put their fingers in before touching the glass. She moved on to look at the large wall panel display of the oracles—goddamn it, the textual artifacts. It had always annoyed her that the texts were literally sidelined in the exhibit, flat and static against the wall. Most of the visitors ignored them in favor of the skeletons.
A metaphor for her research if there ever was one.
The next shoot took place in a fancy museum conference room, with a stone wall with real moss growing out of it. This was the threeway interview that Min had, with equal anticipation and dread, been looking forward to.
It was not going terribly well. Ray was giving an extensive explanation of why he’d declined to go into the ossicarminis exhibit, both when it opened and during the current visit.
“I hate museums,” said Ray. He had his arms crossed. “And I really hate natural history museums.”
On Min’s other side, Damian toyed with his necklace like he was thinking of strangling someone with it. His face was bright red, and he stared at the ground in a way that made Min think there were Kill Bill sirens going off in his head.
“Interesting,” Annika said. “That seems at odds with your line of work.”
“I like looking at bones, not putting them on display. Gawking at dead people is a terrible violation of their dignity, unless you don’t think those people are human. Do you know how many of my ancestors’ bones ended up in museums like this?” He gestured around them. “Or are still here, in some cases. We’re counted among so-called natural history. You’ll never see a pilgrim or a conquistador’s skeleton in a place like this, because that’s disturbing the dead. An Indian? That’s an educational opportunity. And I hate that the two ossicarminis skeletons are in here, too.”
Annika nodded thoughtfully; she seemed to be doing her best Barbara Walters impression. Then she turned to Damian. “Would you like to respond to that?”
Damian took a deep breath, tucking the necklace back into his shirt.
“When I was a kid—”
“Oh, here we go,” Ray muttered.
“When I was a kid’,” he repeated, glaring at Ray. “I grew up in Florida. I was the strange, nerdy kid that nobody wanted to talk to, because I generally wanted to talk about things like the body segments of insects or how cool Carl Sagan was. I had two friends, and they were PBS and the Frost Museum of Science. Museums were the only place where I felt like all of my interests were normal. Like I was normal.”
Min waited to see if he’d add to that, explain the weight of “normality” to a trans kid. Min watched him struggle with it, and in the end, decide against it. She couldn’t blame him; she wasn’t in a rush to out herself on camera either. Some things you kept for yourself or for people like you.
“Museums are places where kids—and adults!—encounter science and history at a hands-on level. It’s where they first make contact with new knowledge and new ideas, and sometimes the only place where they can do that outside of a classroom. I would never have been inspired to study environmental science or archeology if my interest hadn’t been piqued in that museum. Ossicarminis is one of the most groundbreaking discoveries of the century, and the exhibit ensures that people don’t forget that.”
“Then put replicas out!” Ray said. “Most of the people who come through won’t know the difference, or care. There’s no reason that the real bones of real people should be displayed.”
“Doctor Walker, do you consider ossicarminis to be, as you said, ‘real people’? Human, in a way?”
Ray snorted. “They were buried. Their bodies were taken care of and buried together so they wouldn’t be alone. I can’t think of anything more human than that.”
“And I don’t disagree,” Damian said. “They were absolutely people. But we have a duty to the public—”
“To make sure your name is plastered all over everything? What, is your Wikipedia entry not big enough for you?”
Damian stared at him. “Was that a dick reference?”
Min cleared her throat. “Height joke, I think.” At Damian’s wounded stare, she added, “Come on, your Napoleon complex is well-documented.”
Ray barked out a laugh.
Damian looked from her to Ray and back again. “Wow, fuck the pair of you.”
“Doctor Hong, did you have an opinion on the subject of museums?” Annika asked, obviously desperate to get back on topic.
“Just that you should never go on a date in one,” she said.
There was a moment of silence. “Maybe we should take a break,” said Annika.
She gestured to Kamal, who said, “That’s a cut!” The cameraman turned the camera off, and the boom operator relaxed with a soft groan. “We’re going to take five.”
Annika wandered away, and the crew followed. Kamal said, “Y’all want coffee or anything? Water?”
Min and Ray nodded to the offer of caffeine, while Damian sat silently, in a full-blown snit now. She recognized all the signs. Kamal left them alone to their tense, angry silence.
“So museums are bad,” Damian said, his tone ice-cold and casual. “What’s your stance on the individual possession of sacred artifacts?”
Min, too late, remembered that Damian was actually really insecure about his height. It was one of those soft spots that you learned to never poke, not even—or maybe especially not—as a joke. Damian had learned how to fight from his mother, partly to spit in the eye of Latin machismo, partly because it was terrifying effective. Min had seen him exact swift, decisive revenge on presumptuous assholes who never believed the cheerful guy a full head shorter than them would throw down with all the rage of an auntie on a Miami street corner. She should have remembered the pranks on the bitches in Jenner cabin.
“What are you talkin
g about?” Ray said.
“Say, for instance, you wanted a closer look at the only physical evidence ever recorded of non-human writing systems. So you stole it from a university archive and kept it in your filthy-ass apartment. On the goddamn mantle. In direct sunlight.” Damian looked directly at Min. “And then kept it there for more than a year because, fuck it, something about grubby undergrads not appreciating it.”
Ray leaned forward and looked at her too. Min desperately wished, at any point in her life, that she had effectively learned how to lie. It always came so easily to Damian. But no, she’d inherited her mother’s compulsion to overshare.
“Min,” Ray said urgently. “Is this for real?”
This must be the disappointed face that Damian had warned her about.
She couldn’t think of a single thing to say to him. Maybe she could have with enough time, but he didn’t wait. He stood up, grabbed his jacket from the back of the chair, and stalked off.
“Holy fuck,” she whispered.
“Welcome to the hell,” said Damian, leaning back in his seat. “Glad you could join me here.”
***
I see Ray’s point. I do. I think that humans right now, most of us anyway, think of the Earth as a big piggy bank that we can keep pulling stuff out of. And yeah, we need to eat, we need to keep civilization running, we need to at least ensure that our species can do more than simply survive, and we need resources to do that. Knowledge serves a deeper purpose than, like, accumulating a series of initials after your name. Not that you’d fucking know it if you went to grad school. Jesus.
What was I talking about?
Oh right. Yeah. Both sides. Look, I love Damian, but I don’t love his ambitions. And I love Ray but not his lack of ambitions, you know? And I really love the oracle bones, even though that name is garbage and a total rip-off.
But we need to stop borrowing against the future. And the past, too. It belongs to all of us. I guess that means that it also belongs to them, right? To ossicarminis.
Huh.
Shit.
***
Alone in her hotel room, Min pulled out the oracle bones.