And what did you think an anthropologist might have to do with something like this? Not exactly Margaret Mead’s beat, is it?
Did it enliven your existence to learn that in cases involving large numbers of severely burned fatalities, a forensic anthropologist is sometimes called in to assist in the body recovery process? This assistance is especially helpful in identifying so-called commingled remains in situ so as to preserve the scene.
The forensic anthropologist also aids in distinguishing human remains from those of livestock or other animals. Pretty tricky business.
Were you impressed by the number of different specialties and subspecialties of forensic science that might be consulted in a case like this?
In this case, however, the only specialist whose aid was required was the forensic odontologist. You remember, Mr. Galton, the request to have Miss Galton’s dental records flown down.
Do you understand now why science sharply discounts the possibility of what people like to refer to as natural causes? It is nearly always more useful to assume that the term is being employed in a given case as a euphemism, a sort of palliative for the sake of the bereaved.
What is important to remember is that forensic pathology illustrates the intertwined relationship between science and religion most explicitly. Each shares a sort of faith in that which unfolds only in death.
People generally die from unseen things, and for the scientist to believe in them, in these hidden manners of death, in the ways in which a body holds back the secret knowledge of its defilement, is a kind of faith. There are always things that go unseen.
Thus it is a good idea to clamp off the airway of a corpse and therefrom recover unconsumed accelerant.
Also always a good idea to dissect the airway and search for soot to determine if the decedent was alive and breathing during the fire.
Another good idea to check the percentage and degree of body burns in search of inconsistencies.
To check hemoglobin levels, that is a good idea.
Cyanide levels too.
It is always, always, always a good idea to check female corpses for gravidity.
A good idea to check for signs of trauma.
A good idea to bear in mind that the bodies of murder victims are often burned to disguise the crime, or aspects of the crime, such as sexual assault.
To x-ray the corpse or corpses to look for metal and such, as in bullets.
It is a kind of faith; there are always things that go unseen. The other kind of faith is for the graveside, to succor the horror of those goodbyes keened beneath the unbroken sky that drapes the rolling chill of an American cemetery, huge and groomed and implacable.
Thank you, Mr. Galton.
PART TWO
The Locust v. The Elephant
I keep asking you why you had to leave your country, and all you talk about is things that happened to you there.
—U.S. IMMIGRATION JUDGE TO ASYLUM SEEKER, AS REPORTED BY AMNESTY INTERNATIONAL
WHAT THEY RECEIVED IN Los Angeles were negative updates. Before each other set of SLA parents was told of the positive identification of its dead child, Hank and Lydia were first informed that the remains had been determined not to have been Alice’s. Whether this protocol had been formally established ahead of time or had just spontaneously evolved, Hank couldn’t say. It was a strange manifestation of privilege. The report would come, and afterward Lydia would raise her magazine like a mask, replacing her features with those of the cover girl.
It was while all the parents waited for them to run out of corpses to identify that Hank had taken time out to educate himself in the fundamental principles of violent death. He thought he was being brave. He thought there was some convertible value to the stoicism with which he would carry around the knowledge of death by fire, the specific appalling nature of wound ballistics, of kinetic energy and temporary cavity formation, contact wounds and shock waves and secondary projectiles. He thought of preparation for the worst as an amulet against unwelcome feeling. Above all, that.
Helene had come with them. They couldn’t find someone to stay with her at the house on such short notice; it was as stupid as that, just like for a regular family.
She wore one of Alice’s jackets. She was the little sister. She folded her hands and stared into space while her parents spoke to the press, submitting to the inconvenience the way she might have if her parents had run into a chatty acquaintance on the street. At one point, sitting on the edge of her bed the first evening, Friday, she began to sob. She felt the muscles of her face pulling at her and knew how ugly she must be. Lydia descended on her like an infuriated bird. “You stop that. I don’t need this. Just stop it, stop it right now. I don’t need it. Stop now.”
Most of the restaurants they’d known as a family were gone. Now Hank was familiar with L.A. as the sort of girdled entity that business trips held within them, endlessly replicable, but all that was left of the city where they’d made their home for several years was a faint trace; the time they’d spent here was carried whole in the briefest cat’s-paw of breeze that came down off the hills, holding the scent of years; it was here now, but it was not the smell of the present. Then it was gone.
So they sat in a strange restaurant, dark and womblike, its sounds absorbed by the padding that seemed to cover all its surfaces, and ate bacon cheeseburgers on kaiser rolls with fries and Cokes. And everywhere they went, they watched television. There was only one story and they were in it.
They chartered a plane, flew back. What was the point in staying? Alice Galton was not among these insulted bodies. Alice was alive!
They experienced the trip itself as any family might have: Hank resisted buying the expensive airport food. Helene wanted a T-shirt. Lydia bought a magazine and a Vicks inhaler at a newsstand.
In the VIP lounge they were the most famous among the famous. Lydia sat in a corner, far from other people, alone in the contagion of her shame. Her daughter was an armed and dangerous fugitive, charged with nineteen criminal counts.
In Hillsborough, Hank Galton watched the rain, a mist of fine droplets that condensed on the eaves overhanging the leaded glass windows of the study to hang there before falling in stuttered drops to the gravel that ringed the house. There was a damp chill that seeped through the house’s bones and into his, a dank humidity that curled papers and started mildew growing on the soles of unloved shoes in the neglected depths of the closets. He sat at his desk, a large neat rectangle of wood glimpsed from beneath a quarter inch of polyurethane, and watched through the mullioned panes: the rain coming off the roof, the wide gravel belt, the lawn sloping gently toward the wooded hills beyond and the vast gray threat above. Within the past hour the house had filled again after having sat empty for two days, the reporters once again stood outside under the canopy that had been erected for them, the FBI agents camped in the library with their papers sprawled across the old refectory table, but this room retained the forlorn stillness of its vacancy, and Hank settled into it as if he’d sought it out. He smoked and watched, the garlands of smoke oddly holding their shape, compact and sinuous, in the damp, still air, twisting slowly before dissipating.
After a while he stood and moved toward a small armoire. He removed a powder blue cardigan from it and studied the slack flesh of his face in the mirror as he buttoned up. It was a pleasant face, with bland good looks corrupted by heavy black-framed eyeglasses and a weak chin. He shrugged the sweater into place and left the room.
Outside the study, the house had opened itself up to life; through the windows the gray sky spilled a brightened shade of itself. Through a door he saw a maid running a vacuum cleaner, its distant roar rising and falling in ostinato as her hips and shoulders swayed, working the device back and forth over the rug beneath her feet. The bags the driver had carried in were gone from the entryway. Hank thought of all this as a kind of progress, a continuation, a retrieval of life. But when he climbed the stairs, the shadows descended over his body as he rose toward
the darkened landing, where the only light came from the windows at each end of the long hall. The damp lived here. All the doors were closed except for that of a bathroom, in which something rhythmically dripped. He approached his wife’s bedroom and knocked at the door, his head inclined to listen for a response. When it came he opened the door carefully, and the light from the room escaped to lie across the dim hall.
Inside Lydia was half reclined on the bed, her head and torso propped up with pillows. She held a paperback in her hand that Hank dimly recognized from the airplane, her index finger holding the pages apart at her place. The room’s light came from a roseshaded lamp that sat on the bedside table adjacent to an open box of chocolates, which gleamed dully in the pink glow.
She looked across the room at him from behind the hard surface of her eyes, hooded and cold below the lacquered ornament of her hair.
“What is it, Hank.”
“I just wanted. The news, alone, it’s.”
“What news? We have no news that I’m aware of.”
“Lydia. We’ve had the best news.”
“What we have means only that nothing’s changed. Nothing’s changed at all.”
“But she’s alive, Lydia.”
Lydia began to make strange jerking motions with her head and neck, her lips moving, some sort of prearticulation that anticipated her toxic disdain. It came.
“Alive? Alive in that filth, again?”
Hank was unsure what she meant by “again.”
“With those cuckoos, driving around, with guns? Shooting at people, kidnapping them.”
Hank began to wring his hands.
“It almost,” said Lydia, looking through the window into the distance, as if deriving her opinion from the churning sky. “It almost would be better,” she said, “better if—”
“No, it wouldn’t,” said Hank.
“Don’t interrupt me. Yes, better.”
“No.”
“Yes, yes.”
“No, it wouldn’t be better. Do you think the other parents feel better? The other parents would give—”
“Who cares about them and their low-class hoodlum children?” Her hand came up and then the book left it to fly across the room. It landed on a wing chair and bounced softly to the floor.
“You lost your place,” said Hank.
Lydia was crying and Hank walked over and sat at the foot of the bed, not exactly beside her. He reached out and put his hand on one stockinged foot. It felt strange, sharp and armored, through the gauzy fabric of her panty hose.
“Well, the important thing,” he said, “the important thing.” He patted the thorny foot.
“What about our family?” she said, furious. “What about our honor?”
Hank stared at her foot. Some people’s feet had personalities all their own.
“What about me? I don’t understand how it is I’m supposed to get through all this. What am I to tell people?”
Alice had a room here. Things hung in the closet still, ready for her to return home any time she wanted. A tennis shoe peeked out from under the dust ruffle that skirted the box spring. This was normal, wasn’t it? People behaved as if he’d received lessons of some sort on how to live, as if he didn’t put old letters in a shoebox like all the rest of them. His daughter’s clothes still hung in the closet; her dusty photos, framed moments that were famous to her, sat silent on the shelf. All ready, anytime she wanted. All his life Hank had been confident of an answering echo, the sonar of conviviality. To speak was to receive a reply. And suddenly this. They knew she was alive only because they’d sifted through bone and ash. There was no reassuring phone call from her, only photographs of her jaws and teeth flown specially to Los Angeles.
THREE NIGHTS AT THE Cosmic Age. Every minute, all thirty-seven hundred of them, meaningless, each a sort of obstacle to be overcome by the habit of being. First you put one foot down. Then you put the other in front of it. Repeat. It gets Tania to the bathroom, back to the bed. Her job is to stay in the room. Just another face in an upstairs window, she parts the drapes to survey the parking lot, the cars rolling in and out. Vacationers, deliberately insulated from the news, arrive wide-eyed, like refugees from the road, the desert’s affectless severity. The only news that matters is Here We Are. The plates say America’s Dairyland and First in Flight and Garden State and Great Lakes and Keystone State and Land of Enchantment and Live Free or Die and Show-Me State and Sportsman’s Paradise. It infuriates her. She wants them hiding, with her. She wants them to fear the state’s unchecked power. She wants them as angry and terrified as she is. But they aren’t even conscious.
Teko comes into the room and tosses on the bed a newspaper that has been clearly marked in the upper right corner “204.” Their room is 226. Tania says nothing about his inability to resist petty thievery even under these circumstances, even given what happened the—but never mind. There is a story about her parents on the front page. They have returned home. They are relieved but concerned. Grim work continues for the coroner.
“It’s always about you, isn’t it?” Teko says. “It’s not that they’re dead; it’s that you’re not dead.”
“Sorry,” she says.
The good news is that she’s now third-in-command.
And after Disneyland, what? Yolanda went out and got new disguises, and now they crowd into the bathroom to make themselves over quickly. Teko goes to settle the bill, and she and Yolanda exit through the rear. In a little while someone else’s family will shape itself to the rhythms of room 226. Maybe the one in that car with the license plate that says Je Me Souviens. They cross the broiling lot to where the Corvair sits neatly parked between painted lines. Yolanda wears a gray wig and hangs on to Tania, as if for support. They walk slowly.
The road swallows them, Monday morning’s lackadaisical rush pulls the Corvair forward in fits and starts. A shadow fills the car, and from her vantage—lying on the floor, in back—Tania sees the cab of an enormous truck that’s drawn abreast of them, a plump tanned forearm resting on the door frame. Yolanda turns to look down at her, speaks abnormally loudly in her old lady voice.
“Did you find it, dear?” Then she growls: “Get up! Damn it, get up!”
Tania sits up and pretends to hand something to her. There is no need any longer even to figure out these deceptions. Passing on the right, the truck cuts them off.
The bad news is that Cujo is dead and nothing matters.
Teko finds the Golden State Freeway, but it soon becomes apparent that they’re heading in the wrong direction, south.
“Orange County,” he says, grimly.
“Teko, Anaheim is Orange County,” says Yolanda.
“I mean, like, the real Orange County.” He sings, “Folk down there, really don’t care, really don’t care, don’t care, really don’t.”
Tania is impressed.
Over the hills, where the spirits fly, is Costa Mesa, which seems like a perfectly good reason to leave the freeway. They roll down a straight road with the green Pacific at its end and the Catalina Islands on horizon’s edge. Finding a motel is not a problem; there are plenty of them, their signs looming over the road, practically extending into the lanes, competing to offer amenities. Teko picks one that promises LO WKLY RATES and KCHTTES. Tania lies down on the floor of the Corvair under a Cosmic Age bath towel.
It’s thirty dollars a week for a single and another ten for each additional adult. As she sneaks her into the room, Yolanda tells Tania that her presence has to remain a secret because Teko thinks that a man and two women traveling together will arouse too much suspicion, but Tania knows it’s the ten dollars.
She has to hide in the closet for the duration of each of Teko and Yolanda’s frequent outings.
She has to hide in the closet when the clerk comes to explain the two-burner range.
She has to hide in the closet when the maid comes to clean up.
She has to hide in the closet when the manager drops by to ask a question.
&nbs
p; She has to hide in the closet when there are footsteps on the walkway.
“You are a fucking ungrateful bitch. Think about what our comrades went through and you’re complaining about being crammed into, quote unquote, the closet. Don’t you think Cujo would give anything to be ‘crammed into’ a closet right now?”
“Yeah, you think Cujo would be complaining? Huh?”
This is enough to bring forth instant capitulation. Tania sighs heavily and turns toward the closet, or places her hand on the knob, or squats to insert herself, or whatever action’s most appropriate depending on her proximity to the fucking closet.
“The pigs killed Cujo like an animal.”
“An animal.”
“But I bet he didn’t complain.”
“He was a devoted soldier.”
“I recognized the sound of his rifle firing to the last.”
“I bet Cujo’d be real disappointed in you.”
She’s inside, closing herself into the muffled darkness.
She sits in the dark of the closet on the plywood floor, crying silently, the hems of Yolanda’s dresses draped over her shoulders, feeling the tears running down her cheeks, first the hot rolling droplets and then the cold tracks, to pool at her jawline and fall. It feels sometimes as if she’s spent her life crying without making a sound, has acquired a dubious expertise.
Teko returns one afternoon with a gallon jug of Gallo Hearty Burgundy. He fills the ice bucket from the machine and, with two hands holding the jug, pours drinks over ice for all three of them. Three rounds later, it is apparent that this libation flagrantly violates the letter of the SLA Code of War that stipulates, “ONCE TRUE REVOLUTIONARIES HAVE SERIOUSLY UNDERTAKEN REVOLUTIONARY ARMS STRUGGLE, MARIJUANA AND ALCOHOL ARE NOT USED FOR RECREATIONAL PURPOSES OR TO DILUTE OR BLUR THE CONSCIOUSNESS OF REALITY, BUT VERY SMALL AMOUNTS FOR MEDICINAL PURPOSES TO CALM NERVES UNDER TIMES OF TENSION, NOT TO DISTORT REALITY.”
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