Then I wondered why I didn’t mind not knowing the answers to these questions.
Because that’s what you love about anthropology, T had said.
I asked her what that was.
The same thing I love about acting: guessing at how to be good at being somebody else.
87
—Dig—
Dr. Madera put the car in park. We grabbed our gear.
Trego Mound was a low flattened hump, no different in appearance from most of its neighbor mounds. Several summer volunteers were already up top. They stood at the shade-tented picnic table, sharing a bottle of sunscreen. Curt introduced them, emphasizing how far they’d come to work here: Charlie, a retired advertising executive from San Francisco, Mary-Beth and Nirupama, two Australian Army engineers from Melbourne, and Wu, a sculptor from Shanghai.
“The mounds are magnets,” said Dr. Madera.
The tarps that covered the site in the off-season had been peeled back, weighted with cinder blocks and dump piles. They crinkled underfoot. I stepped to the edge of the exposed excavation trench. I’d seen hundreds of pictures of trenches, and dozens of pictures of this trench—I recognized the dimensions, the size of the darkness, the right-angled exactness—but in person, it had the feel of a work of public art. I thought of my aunt. I touched the dirty ladder that led to the bottom. Even Curt could stand down there and disappear.
Dr. Madera paired me with Haley, an upbeat undergrad, square and strong with youth. Most of her face was her smile. She’d worked on-site last summer.
Golnaz, Rishi, and Mieszko unpacked equipment.
“Get digging,” said Curt.
Haley laughed. “He can’t not say that.”
We clattered down the ladder, out of the early sun, and into a pocket of night. The air was cold and damp, the walls were soft and musty. Black moths bounced off my face. Everything I’d learned about this mound from D. Maximilian Doty’s notes, experts’ commentary on those notes, and Curt’s scholarly articles sank away—the smell of the trench was the smell of being a kid. I remembered wrestling with my brother on a berm by the highway; I remembered finding clay pits at the Indiana Dunes with Torrentelli and Barton, scooping out handfuls, smearing our faces, starting a clayball fight; I remembered sundown games of capture the flag, stalking through neighbors’ backyards, hoping that if I crossed paths with someone, I’d see them before they saw me.
I remembered hiding from Busia behind a heap of mulch.
“Shit damn hell!” she’d screamed.
“Got it?” said Haley.
I said I got it. She’d been explaining their system.
“It’s just keeping it even,” she said. “One zone at a time. It’ll go fast!”
We shoveled backfill into wheelbarrows.
The Australians pushed the wheelbarrows to the dump pile.
We shoveled.
They pushed.
It was the kind of work I knew, which should have settled me, but didn’t. I felt like I did when I overdressed.
More than once, Dr. Madera had said, “So much of archaeology has so little to do with archaeology.”
Haley and I bent at the same time and bumped butts. I dropped my shovel.
“We’re dancing!” she said, waggling her hips.
Sunlight rectangled into the trench.
The shade had a springlike chill, the light a summery heat.
Curt appeared at the edge, holding a clipboard.
“Good,” he said.
I turned too quickly and nearly hacked Haley’s face with my shovel.
“Whoa!” she said, sidestepping.
“You picked a proper place for a murder, anyway,” said one of the Australians.
“The burial’s half-done!” said the other.
Curt observed.
We worked in the shade. We worked in the sun.
The smell of the soil shifted.
“Curt?” said Haley.
We climbed out, Curt climbed in. He crouched. He picked at the soil and rubbed it between his fingers. From above, his hat looked like it belonged on the head of a hobo-clown.
“Trowels,” he said, standing. “Sift what’s left.”
The Australians set up the sifters.
At the picnic table, the retired advertising executive and the sculptor coded the last of the brown bags.
“You two,” said Curt, climbing out.
Haley had brought her own trowel, a shiny model in a pouch. I pulled a crusty one from a communal tool bag. We went into the trench, we went onto our knees. A stale coffee-stink punched up from my socks. My stomach popped and growled.
Curt watched. “Go slow,” he said.
I went too slow.
“No,” said Curt. “Haley, show him.”
“Like this,” she said.
I went too fast.
“No,” said Curt.
I went too hard and I went too light.
“Haley,” said Curt.
“It’s tricky at first,” said Haley.
Curt said, “Up here.”
I left the trench; Mieszko took my place. The Australians sifted. The retired advertising executive and the sculptor had disappeared. Golnaz clicked at a laptop at the picnic table. Dr. Madera and Rishi stood at a total station, surveying.
“iPad,” said Curt.
I found his iPad and brought it over and when I handed it to him I dropped it.
“No,” said Curt, stopping me, picking it up himself.
I went to the cooler for a bottle of water. I drank it as slowly as I could.
At noon, the retired advertising executive and the sculptor showed up with trays of meat and sides from a St. Louis barbecue.
Curt said, “Eating-time.”
We walked off-mound to a circle of skinny trees, where we unfolded blankets and sat in shade. From there we had a side view of Monks Mound: the curving paved path to its foot, the steep stairs to its wide platform top. It was a state park. Locals and tourists strolled and jogged, on their own and with babies. A man in military fatigues marched up the stairs, down the stairs, up the stairs, a sandbag tucked into his backpack. Dr. Madera undid the covers on the food and Rishi and Mieszko distributed napkins and plates. I stared at Monks Mound, working to remember why I was there. Thousands of years ago, men and women had settled this land to hunt, fish, and farm. For a while it went well. Their village teemed into a town, their town into a city, their city into a cultural capital, their cultural capital into a powerful continental trade center. They built mounds. From the mounds their leaders ran ceremonies, sacrifices, feasts. Sometimes they lived on the mounds, sometimes they buried their dead in them. Time and weather buried what they didn’t. What we dug up could teach us about these people, but we’d never know the basics, including the names they’d given to this place and to themselves—“Cahokia” and “Cahokians” were terms derived from the name of a tribe that happened to be in the area when blundering Trappist monks arrived in the seventeenth century, a few hundred years after the city’s abandonment. Most of what could be known could no longer be known.
88
—Ears Covered, Eyes Closed—an Artist—
The smell of perfume, the smell of cologne.
Herbs and flowers. Spices and smoke.
I opened my eyes and I dropped my hands from my ears: I was facing the wall.
A person was walking the corridor, passing my cell.
What he or she was wearing was rustling and jingling, ticking and scraping, snapping.
A costume, an outfit, a uniform.
I wasn’t looking.
He or she was passing me.
Fruits and soils—earth, juice, wind.
He or she passed me.
He or she reached the end of the corridor and stopped.
I didn’t look.
I said to myself: You can’t see.
Then he or she sang. The singing was skilled.
I was hearing the singing—I was hearing the song.
As I was hear
ing the song I was forgetting it. I was forgetting its rhythm and melody, I was forgetting if it had words or didn’t, I was forgetting what all of its elements together were making me feel, think, imagine.
It was going in as a real something and coming out as a nothing.
89
—the End of the Dig—
I fixed up a brisket sandwich with too much brisket in it.
Curt and Dr. Madera debated other local lunch options.
The volunteers eased into an exchange of inside jokes.
Golnaz started a get-to-know-you conversation: Haley was from East St. Louis; Rishi from Sugar Land, Texas; Mieszko from Szczecin, a Polish city near the German border.
“Stanley is Polish,” said Golnaz.
Mieszko nodded. He had a rumpled, sleepy look. “Many from Chicago are.”
Rishi smiled at this. His smile was smarmy.
I went for seconds.
Haley said, “What do you think we’ll find this summer?”
I fixed up a pulled pork sandwich with too much pulled pork in it.
“Post molds,” said Golnaz.
“Whelk shells,” said Mieszko.
“Whelk shells and post molds,” said Rishi.
Haley said she hoped we’d find human bones, though she knew it wasn’t likely that we would. “Last summer, at their site, the Italians found a zygomatic fragment,” she said. “That would make my life!”
Dr. Madera and Curt remembered a professor they’d had, a sexist old man, ethically out of whack but well-respected by the professional community. Curt said that you could be a terrible person but a terrific scientist. Dr. Madera said no way. They bounced back and forth, their banter friendly, but not without a certain strain—they hurried to get to the more general points that they agreed on.
Rishi noticed that I noticed. He covertly mimed a penis going into a vagina, a gesture I hadn’t seen since college.
I loped over for dessert.
“Stanley,” said Golnaz. “What is your opinion?”
“We’ll find a legendary artifact with magical properties. International adventure will ensue. We’ll save America.”
I’d meant it as a joke, but it came out caustic. I put two big brownies on my plate.
Rishi hadn’t stopped staring at me. I stared back.
“You box, don’t you,” he said.
His nose, I noticed then, had been flattened more than once. He had a fighter’s build: no-necked but long-armed, stocky-lanky. I told him that I’d boxed in high school and that in college I’d been in an early morning boxing workout group. I didn’t tell him that for the last three weeks I’d been slugging the bag at the gym, doing footwork and strength-training, that I hoped it’d help me quit smoking next month.
“How could you tell?” said Golnaz to Rishi.
“You watch any MMA?” he said to me.
“My posture,” I said to Golnaz.
He smiled again. “Not that.”
I said I didn’t watch MMA, not anymore.
“Why not?”
I’d sworn it off because I’d found myself eager to see fighters’ faces destroyed. Without wanting to, I’d begun to root for heavyweight bouts to be determined by decision, no submissions, no knockouts, the men pounded round by round into lumbering wreckage, their faces bruised and bloodied, swollen and broken, simplified. After the winner was announced—when his arm was hoisted by a ref, when he howled and flexed and strutted—I’d be stricken with heavy shame. I felt complicit in their disfiguration.
“I stopped liking it,” I said.
Rishi wanted to talk about an upcoming title fight, Roddewig versus “El Jeffecito.”
I hadn’t heard of them.
“Jeffecito throws a really weird hook to the body,” he said, putting up his fists, demonstrating.
Part of what I’d appreciated about MMA was tracking how the fighters applied boxing techniques, how they modified them. But I didn’t know what Rishi was talking about. I couldn’t see it.
“Stand up,” he said, standing up.
I did.
Rishi hopped around and threw a few practice jabs. Then he presented the punch stage by stage. I let his fist touch me. He explained why the form was unusual, something about the hip.
Everyone was watching.
“It’s actually easier to see it faster,” said Rishi.
“Go for it.”
“Try to block it.”
He hammered my side, fast, way too fast for me to block, and not even half as hard as he could. My organs joggled.
“You see that?”
“Yes,” I said, but I hadn’t.
He put up his guard. “Try it.”
I’d met men like Rishi before, men who’d gone into martial arts to start fights with unskilled strangers at bars, who needed to knock big drunk wannabe brawlers onto their asses and into ambulances in order to arrive at end-of-the-night erections. It’d taken me until college to learn to walk away—first from being incited by them, then from becoming them.
But Curt said, “What the hell are you idiots doing.”
And I said, “Try to block it,” and Rishi said, “I will,” and I feinted with my left and swung with my right and cracked him in the ribs about as hard as he’d cracked me. My thumb popped.
He didn’t show any sign of having been hit.
“Wow,” he said, dropping his hands. “I’ll be honest: I didn’t think you had the balls to feint.”
“Go fuck your mother,” I said.
For a moment he was too surprised to be insulted.
Curt stepped up, looming.
“Pretend to be adults,” he said. “Or go home.”
“Hold up, we’re cool,” said Rishi, offering a handshake.
I sat instead.
The afternoon was used to remove and screen what was left of the backfill. Everyone ignored what had happened in their own way: Dr. Madera didn’t seem to have noticed, Curt became oddly polite, Haley increased her chattiness, Rishi and Mieszko increased their silence, the volunteers avoided me, Golnaz exuded a competence, calm, and focus that gradually increased the competence, calm, and focus of everyone but me, and I tripped on a bucket.
“I do that once a day!” said Haley.
I worked at the sifters.
“Have you tried it like this?” said Curt.
I worked at a total station.
“Try that knob,” said Curt.
“Almost,” said Curt.
“The other way,” said Curt.
I worked on the databases.
“This column,” said Golnaz.
“This row,” said Golnaz.
I sat on a far cinder block and smoked a cigarette. Dragonflies arced above me, pairing and unpairing. A hawk screamed. I flexed my thumb: it was swollen.
“Pack it in,” said Curt. “Day’s done.”
We closed up the site.
On the ride to the hotel, Golnaz asked Dr. Madera a series of complicated technical questions about the database program. The interface was old, they agreed, and in some ways, needlessly complex. The only reason it was still used was that no one wanted to learn a new one.
“For my thesis I will design a new program,” said Golnaz.
“So little of archaeology is archaeology,” said Dr. Madera.
I stayed outside with a cigarette while they walked into the hotel.
“You shouldn’t do that,” said an old man in a wheelchair, on his way to the parking lot. He was rigged up with nose tubes and an oxygen tank.
“What my husband means is, he’s envious,” said his wife.
“Yes,” he said.
I asked them how long they’d been married.
“Forty-nine years,” said the woman.
“How do you like marriage.”
“We don’t,” said the man.
“But that’s what we like about it,” said the woman.
“Yes,” he said.
In my room I sat on the floor and called T. She didn’t answer. I d
idn’t leave a message. A squeaky panic screwed in on me, pulling tight. I imagined T and Afiya talking, smoking, drinking; I imagined T coming to a decision about us without me there. My brother had texted, wondering if we’d found a piece of the One True Cross and whether or not time-traveling Nazis had attempted to steal it yet, and my aunt had texted, asking if archaeologists were secret artists or if artists were secret archaeologists. I changed out of my clothes and I washed my face. My thumb hurt—it was hot. At the ice machine I filled a cup and jammed my hand in it.
The Sox were winning 12 to 1. The network replayed the first-inning grand slam, slow and tall to center field. A triumphant kid had caught it barehanded.
I took a break from icing to try to roll a cigarette and couldn’t.
There was a knock at the door.
“Are you coming to dinner?” said Golnaz, when I let her in.
She hadn’t changed out of her field clothes. Around her hung the smell of sweat, sun, dirt.
“A challenging first day,” she said, nodding. “It is normal.”
I asked if it was challenging for her.
She looked at me strangely. “Yes, that is what I mean—it has been a challenging first day, for me.”
I was sure that she was saying this to make me feel better.
We went to a Mexican restaurant cluttered with kitsch, with bright plastic parakeets and palm trees. Mariachi music bumped and trilled. Every surface, including the tables, smelled like mop water. The word authentic appeared in the description of every item on the menu. Dr. Madera ordered drinks and appetizers, in Spanish. Curt rolled his eyes. Two old white men, the only other party, sat at the next table, one of them donning an oversized FELIZ CUMPLEAÑOS sombrero. A server brought pitchers of margaritas and platters of taquitos and quesadillas. The margarita tasted like margarita-scented window cleaner. I drank it steadily. The problem wasn’t that I was inherently bad at fieldwork, I said to myself, or that I was “distracted” into incompetence by what was happening with me and T. The problem was worse. The problem was that where there was supposed to be desire—where desire had once been, or where I’d mistakenly believed desire to have once been—was instead the incremental disintegration of that desire. I looked at Haley, who listened closely to Dr. Madera and Curt, waiting to put her word in; I felt sure that desire was a word for “talent.” I looked at Golnaz, who listened closely to everyone, converting her observations into conversation-enhancing questions; I felt sure that desire was a word for “work ethic.”
The Made-Up Man Page 17
